Alright, let me walk you through this little project I ended up calling ‘bosun joe’. It wasn’t anything fancy, really, just something I needed to get done because, well, things were getting messy.
So, the whole thing started a few months back. I was juggling a bunch of small tasks, you know, checking on statuses here, pulling some data there, reporting back. It was eating up my time like crazy. Every morning, same routine, click here, check that, copy-paste this. Tedious stuff. Honestly, it was driving me up the wall.
Getting Started
I figured, there has to be a better way. I’m not exactly a coding wizard, mind you, but I know my way around a few basic scripts. So, I decided I’d try to automate some of it. The main headache was collating information from different spots. Think like, grabbing a status from one system, a count from another, maybe a log snippet from somewhere else.
First, I just sat down and listed out exactly what I was doing manually. Step by step.
- Log into system A.
- Run command X.
- Copy output Y.
- Log into system B.
- Check value Z.
- Combine Y and Z into a message.
- Send the message.
Seeing it written down made it seem both simpler and dumber that I was doing it by hand.
The Messy Middle
I decided to use some simple scripting tools I already knew a bit. Didn’t want to learn a whole new language for this. Started patching things together. The first version? A total disaster. It worked like, maybe 30% of the time. It would fail if one system was slow, or if the output format changed slightly. Spent a whole weekend just trying to make it reliable.
There was this one part, connecting to an older system, that was particularly stubborn. It kept timing out. I tried increasing delays, adding retries… felt like I tried everything. Almost scrapped the whole idea right there. But then, I stumbled on a weird little workaround, basically telling the script to pretend it was a different kind of connection. Don’t ask me why it worked, it just did. Felt like black magic.
I kept tweaking it bit by bit. Added some error checking – like, if it couldn’t connect, it would just report that instead of crashing. Made the output a bit cleaner. It slowly started taking shape. It wasn’t elegant, lots of duct tape and wishful thinking holding it together, but it was my duct tape and wishful thinking.
Meet ‘bosun joe’
Why ‘bosun joe’? Well, a bosun’s job on a ship is to look after the gear, keep things running, kind of the nuts-and-bolts guy. And ‘Joe’ just sounded like a reliable, no-nonsense name. So, ‘bosun joe’ it became. My little digital helper making sure the small stuff was handled.
Now, every morning, ‘bosun joe’ runs. It chugs along, grabs the info, puts it together in a neat little summary, and pings me. Does it work perfectly every single time? Nope. Sometimes things still break, an update on one of the systems might throw it off. But fixing it now is way faster than doing the whole manual dance every day.
The main thing is, it freed up a solid chunk of my morning. Time I can actually use for stuff that requires, you know, thinking. It’s not revolutionary tech, just a practical fix for a personal headache. And honestly, building it, even with the frustrations, was kinda satisfying. Took a problem, wrestled with it, and came up with my own slightly janky solution. That’s ‘bosun joe’.
