Transcriber: Martina Abrami Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
In 2014, I was living in São Paulo, Brazil.
The country was obsessed with the coming World Cup,
and I was too.
I absolutely had to get to as many games as possible,
but there was a problem.
The only way to get tickets was this horrible website
that would release them at random times throughout the day.
I was working as a teacher at the time,
and when somebody at work would see tickets pop up,
they’d run around the hallways telling all the other teachers
and we’d spend time of our lessons abandon our students
and try to buy tickets.
I got really frustrated with this process.
Nobody wants to spend their day refreshing web pages,
neglecting children,
or worst of all, miss a release because they were too slow.
But by using a little trick,
the right click “inspect” that’s available on every browser,
I was able to see a straightforward list of how many tickets were available.
And this was an eye opening moment for me
because it showed me that the information I wanted was right there
and though I didn’t have the tools yet to make it myself,
I knew what I needed.
An automated program that would check that site
and let me know when there were tickets.
So I started coding.
I learned just enough to know what to look for on Google,
where I found snippets that other people had already written,
which I copy-pasted and pieced together in a way that worked for me.
I got stuck for a bit on this one part,
but I learned that the Internet is full of forums
of people willing to help you if you ask for it,
like I did on Stack Overflow.
After some help I got there, it all clicked for me.
I put my program on a little PC
and set it to run every minute of every day,
just to be sure I didn’t miss another release.
Because of my program, I ended up going to nine different World Cup games.
But most importantly,
I learned that the vast amount of information on the Internet
can be put to use in a way that’s helpful to me.
This recognition that I could create my own solution spurred me on.
And with each bit I learned,
I started noticing things in my life that I was doing on the computer
and that were repetitive.
I started getting really frustrated with things that were repetitive, and so
I looked for every opportunity I could
to automate it.
One of those repetitive tasks was figuring out
where to drink beer with my friends.
We used to spend a lot of time figuring out which beer bars to go to.
So I made a program that grabbed the list of beers from the sites,
found the rating,
and then put it all together in one place where we could have a quick overview.
Of course, I had visions of engatados.com.br
being a revenue generating website
to be the toast of the São Paulo beer scene.
But no one came.
I used it a lot.
A couple of friends used it, too,
but it didn’t matter
because that improved my quality of life
by automating tasks
and spending less time on the computer
and more time with my friends.
Since then I’ve automated a lot of other things:
finding cheap train tickets,
finding the best wine deals at my supermarket,
the best restaurants to go to.
I’ve even use it to plan trips to wine regions in Spain and Italy.
You may have noticed a theme with these topics I work with.
It’s mostly food, drink and travel.
Those are things that I’m generally interested in.
But most importantly, it was really useful for me to automate them.
I’m sure you have things like this in your life, too.
Finding airplane tickets,
checking if your favorite pair of shoes is on sale,
finding a COVID vaccine date.
This is the key to finding your first task to automate.
it should be annoying for you to do,
but it has to be something that you find interesting and useful.
But something strange happened as I started writing all this code.
It became something I do for fun, for relaxation, or if I was bored.
It became a creative outlet for me.
And at one point, when I was searching for a new job,
it became for me a way for me to blow off the stress of that.
I decided to create a Twitter bot that was for education jargon
or edu babble
just to see how many followers it could get.
It ended up getting around 14.000 of them
and it was getting retweet of the nonsense that it posted
and private messages asking for teaching advice.
And it did relieve stress for me because it was funny and it was fun.
It certainly wasn’t something I thought I’d experience
when I started writing code.
So keep an eye out for your World Cup problem
that gets you started automating and coding.
And I hope that, like me, you end up enjoying it
for the enriching creative act it can be.
Thank you.