The Real Reason To ‘Learn To Code’? Automating Your Life
On the joys of writing scripts that do scut work
Last night I automated the tip of my index finger.
I was getting super annoyed by an infinite-scrolling site. I generally hate those: I’m a journalist, and every so often I’m a) doing research that b) requires me to go back several weeks, months or years on c) an infinite-scrolling site. So I have to sit there hitting “page down” or “end” over and over again.
Last night I had to do that at a couple of sites, and after a few minutes I got bored and decided: Screw it, I’m gonna automate this.
So I wrote a quick, tiny script using the programming language Python. The script does one simple thing: It hits the “end” button on my keyboard, waits two seconds, then hits it again. Here’s what it looks like …
Utterly simple! But it did the job. I started it running, flipped over to the site I was reading, and let the script hit “end” over and over, paging downwards and downwards, while I, like, mixed myself a…
