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I have a story about engineer vs technician. In my very first technology job (title was web assistant, so, very much technician) we updated our online education platform and suddenly all our course were breaking. After some investigation we found that one line in an xml inside the course zip file needed changing. So, my manager planned how to do it. We'll divide the 40k courses into batches, different individuals would tackles certain batches and it all would be done in about 4-6 weeks... Well, probably my ADHD brain or just being lazy but that sounded like an awful lot of repetitive work that I didn't want to do (change file extension to .zip, decompress, go to file X, find line with XYZ and replace for ABC, save, compress, change file extension back to proprietary format), so after talking with my boss and asking permission I got a week to try to automate that. Back then I knew almost nothing about software development but I was aware of bash and python... so I cobbled together a janky script that would likely make me cry if I saw it now, tested it on 1 course, then on 10, then on 100... and then shared with my boss. It all worked perfectly! We still batches of about 1k courses at a time to confirm that everything was working ok, and in the end the job took about 2 days and 1 person (as opposed to 4-6 weeks and 5 people). I was very proud of that accomplishment and very likely marked my perception of the value of software as a tool to decrease human effort (nobody got laid off or leaved, is not like we didn't have A TON of work apart from that migration). Anyways, just wanted to share :-) |
Re-encode video files to web-friendly formats and upload them (prior to YouTube).
There was a guy whose full-time job was to sit and do that with a Windows GUI.
First approximation was an AutoIt script. Second approximation was with bash and ffmpeg.