Automation

The oldest habit on this blog: something needs doing more than twice, so it gets written down as a script instead. The posts under this tag span ten years and almost nothing in common technically — a Groovy script feeding a few hundred SoapUI requests from a text file, a JavaScript snippet clicking a YouTube button until a channel had loaded, a Windows scheduled task that refuses to flash a terminal window, a Stream Deck button showing three Home Assistant timers at once.

What they share is the shape of the problem. Some tool does 90% of what you need and has no hook for the last 10%, so you sit between two systems and glue them. That is also why several of these age badly: the glue is attached to somebody else's interface, and interfaces move. The YouTube one is explicitly marked deprecated for exactly that reason, and the two newest posts here are both about working around an API that changed under a tool rather than about the tool itself.

2016–2026 / 8 posts