[SethKinast]

When they released the COVID vaccine for under-5s, my wife got my son the first appointment she could find, which was 2.5 months away and after preschool started.

I looked at the appointment site the hospital used, and saw that the way it populated its appointment calendar was to load an endpoint that accepted a date range and just returned a JSON array of appointments. I built a quick bash script and pointed it at Pushover, and a day or two later my phone notified me that there was an appointment available for the very next day.

He ended up getting COVID shortly after starting school and it was ultra-mild, so I'm doubly grateful that a little script might have saved him some suffering as well as freeing us to go out in the world earlier.