So, I’ve been meaning to talk about this little adventure I had, which I’m now fondly calling my “concatulations” project. Yeah, you heard that right. Not congratulations, but concatulations. Because it was all about stringing things together, and boy, was it a journey.
It all started last week. My manager, bless his heart, he comes over and says, “We need a quick report! Just pull all the customer comments together. From the website form, the app feedback, and those survey thingies we sent out. Easy peasy, right?”
Easy peasy. Right. If only.
First off, the website form dumps data into one ancient database. The app feedback? That’s a series of badly formatted CSVs someone emails over whenever they remember. And the surveys? Those are in spreadsheets, but every version has a slightly different column order. Classic stuff.
So, my job was to take all this… this digital spaghetti… and make one clean, readable list. One. Single. List. Sounds simple, but it’s the kind of task that makes you question your life choices.
I fired up my usual tools. Tried a bit of Python scripting first. Got halfway, then hit a wall with some weird encoding from the app CSVs. Characters looked like alien hieroglyphics. Spent hours on that. No dice.
Then I thought, okay, maybe I can dump everything into a temporary database and SQL my way out of it. More hours. Managed to import some of it, but then the survey spreadsheet variations just laughed in my face. Dates formatted differently, text fields split weirdly. You know the drill.
I was getting properly fed up. My coffee intake went through the roof. I even found myself staring out the window, wondering if I could just manually copy-paste everything. Don’t laugh! I actually considered it for a good ten minutes. The thought of doing that for hundreds of entries was what snapped me back.
This whole ordeal reminded me of my first ever IT gig. Part-time, mostly fetching coffee and untangling cables. But sometimes, they’d give me these mind-numbing data entry tasks from paper forms. This felt just like that, only with more ways for the computer to say “NO.” At least with paper, you knew what you were up against.
Anyway, after what felt like an eternity, and a lot of muttered words I wouldn’t want my grandma to hear, I basically had to build a Frankenstein’s monster of a process. A bit of script here to clean the CSVs. A different approach for the database extract. And for the spreadsheets, well, let’s just say I got very intimate with manually re-arranging columns before trying to import them.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t elegant. There were so many concatenate operations, string splits, and replacements that my script looked like a patchwork quilt. But, step by painful step, it started to come together.
And then, finally. The moment of truth. I ran the final script. And it worked. A single, clean list of comments. I almost cried. Okay, maybe not cried, but I definitely let out a huge sigh of relief and leaned back in my chair, feeling like I’d just wrestled a bear.
So, yeah. Concatulations to me, I guess. I got it done. The report went out. Manager was happy. Probably thinks it took me an hour. That’s the kicker, isn’t it? The stuff that looks simple on the surface is often a complete nightmare underneath.
It’s funny, we have all this fancy tech, AI this, cloud that, and yet, we’re still spending days just trying to stick bits of text together properly. Makes you think. Or maybe it just makes you want another coffee. For me, it’s definitely the coffee.