Alright, let’s talk about this little thing I put together. It started, like many things do, out of pure laziness, or maybe let’s call it ‘efficiency seeking’. I was spending way too much time manually grabbing bits of info from different spots every morning just to get a basic pulse check on some ongoing processes.
Honestly, it was tedious. Copy-pasting from logs, checking a database table or two, sometimes even just pulling numbers from plain text files. Nothing complex, but doing it daily? Nah, that gets old fast. I figured, I can automate this mess.
Getting Started
My first thought was super simple: a quick script. Probably Python, yeah? Seemed like the easiest tool for the job. Just grab the data, stitch it together, maybe print it to the console or dump it into a text file. Should take an hour, tops. Famous last words, right?
So, I fired up my editor and started coding. Reading the database was easy enough. The text files? A bit fiddly with parsing, but manageable. Then I hit the logs. The format was… let’s say ‘inconsistent’. Spent more time than I’d like to admit writing regex that felt like black magic.
Things Got Complicated
Okay, got the data fetching mostly working. Then I thought, scrolling through a raw text dump is kind of ugly. Wouldn’t it be nicer to just have it displayed neatly on a simple web page? Just something I could glance at?
Danger zone. I knew it. But I did it anyway.
- First, I tried just having the Python script generate a raw HTML file. Basic tables, maybe some bold text.
- It worked, technically. But it looked like something from the 90s. My eyes bled a little.
- “Okay, just a tiny bit of CSS,” I told myself. “Just to make it readable.”
- Yeah right. Suddenly I’m messing with flexbox, trying to center things, picking colors. Half a day vanished just tweaking the look of a tool only I would ever see. Classic yak shaving.
Then came scheduling. How to run this thing automatically? Cron job seemed the obvious answer on my Linux box. Set it up to run early each morning. Easy enough, thankfully.
Hitting Snags
First few days, it seemed okay. Then, one morning, no report. Checked the script. It had crashed. One of the data sources was offline temporarily. Right. Error handling. Forgot about that.
So, I went back, wrapped the data fetching parts in clumsy try-except blocks. If something fails, it just notes it in the report and moves on. Not elegant, but better than crashing.
Then I realized I sometimes needed to look back at previous days. Just overwriting the report file wasn’t gonna cut it. So, more fiddling. Changed the script to save the output file with the date in the name. Like . Simple, but effective for my needs.
The Result?
So, what did I end up with? It’s basically a Python script, kicked off by cron. It pulls data from a few places (when they’re available), attempts to handle basic errors, formats the info into a very plain HTML page using some hardcoded styles, and saves that page with a date stamp.
Is it robust? Heck no. Is it scalable? Definitely not. Would I show it to anyone else? Probably not without cleaning it up significantly. It’s held together with digital duct tape and hope.
But here’s the thing: it works. For me. It saves me that annoying manual task every morning. It gives me the quick overview I wanted. It’s a personal tool, born from a specific need, and it fulfills that need, quirks and all. It’s a good reminder that sometimes ‘good enough’ is actually good enough, especially when it’s just for yourself. And that ‘quick’ projects rarely stay quick.
