A couple of roles I’ve been talking with hiring managers for have been outside the .NET ecosystem I’m most familiar with. In particular, two are codebases in Python.
Steve McConnell, in Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art, states that developers working in interpreted languages can be up to twice as productive as those working with compiled languages.
Python looks like the next language for me to learn. There’s great support for it on devices as small as Raspberry Pis, and its pretty commonly used in scripts running on severs.
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IFTTT made a change to their free tier, requiring you to sign up for a pro account if you want more than 3 recipes.
As a long time Evernote user, I used IFTTT to funnel data from social media sites into a daily journal entry. That journal entry itself was created each morning by IFTTT also. This automated system worked like a charm for years.
Granted, there’s no reason I couldn’t pay the small monthly fee for IFTTT, but it got me thinking...
How hard would it be, really, to write a few Python scripts to automate what IFTTT already does?
Using Evernote’s API, I can create notes. A cron job on my web host could run the script every morning and generate the journal entry.
I could leave a few other scripts on IFTTT, or automate them too. One, for example, appends all my tweets into the journal. It’d be an opportunity to lean about Twitter’s API too.
These are the dangerous things that happen with a developer with more time than sense.