davidbiehl

I used to work for a small medical device distributor. We used an e-commerce platform that, at the time, didn’t have an API. We wanted to synchronize our products with their platform as products were added, discontinued, copy/image changes, etc.

I ended up using capybara (a Ruby gem for writing browser automation instructions for system tests in web apps) to automate all of the “clicks” to make the updates in the system.

It actually worked pretty well. It wasn’t fast, but it was better than having a human keep the data in sync.

After a few years, the platform released a REST API, and we transitioned to that. But browser automations worked great in the meantime!

edit: spelling

i was raised in the church of jesus christ of latter day saints (aka the mormon church) at some point in my adult life, the stress and anxiety of being a “practicing” member of the church led to the point where i couldn’t attend sacrament meetings without a panic attack. i have stopped participating and have found that my quality of life has improved.

i’m not sure what my belief system is, but i think about death a lot… and in an odd way it helps me appreciate life right now. the thought of an afterlife freaks me out. i want to believe that death is the end. the scarcity of time reminds me how valuable my friends and family are, reminds me to be generous to others, and helps me to live in the moment.

i believe in karma and have found that when i help others in their time of need that it circles back around when i am in need.

in my experience, organized religion overcomplicates things.

let’s be excellent to each other.

this happened to me the other day for an item i was selling. at the first mention of a “code”, i told them first come first served and i have other people interested. that ended the conversation.

I live in a small ag-town in Merced county and we are currently allotted 3 days a week to water our lawns. During the last drought it was reduced to 2 days a week. This is a city ordinance and I suppose it’s up to the different cities to enact their own limits.

2 days a week is not enough water to keep a lawn alive when the highs hover around 100F in the summer. Many people converted to “drought friendly” landscaping, and there was a boom of lawn painting services. (Painting your dead lawn green so it still looked alive)

I saw an “adopt a highway” sign that the company sponsored while visiting the city where they happened to be headquartered. I looked online to see if they had any positions available. They did, so I applied and the rest is history.

I did the same thing: Unfollowed everybody except for the people I truly cared about. Needless to say the news feed wasn’t nearly as full, and a lot of the content was redundant because I had a real “off network” relationship with the people I still followed. It became unnecessary to check Facebook at this point, and now I rarely log in, if at all.

I also highly recommend curating who you follow, you may realize you don’t need FB after all.

I found a similar thing with email notifications. If you regularly login to FB and look at your feed they will leave you alone. Delete the app from your phone or neglect logging in and you’ll start to get email notifications about the silliest things. Of course they don’t contain much more than “so and so shared a link” without any description of what was shared (trying to get you to login and look.) Not quite as bad as 2FA number, but irritating nonetheless.

i would love to read a follow up that dove into the PHP dark ages. i was doing PHP around that time as well.