Tagged with 'php'

Whoops! Cleaning up Mistakes via API

• August 09, 2021
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, php, tech

Posting again after kind of a lengthy break. It's summertime, and for lots of disparate reasons I've queued up topics but haven't had the ambition or taken the time to write them all out. So today we get a tale of automation mistakes and the subsequent cleanup.

A Twitter Bot for Dad Jokes

• April 12, 2021
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

About a month ago, I discovered this gem of a tweet:

TIL fatherhood dot gov has a dad joke API pic.twitter.com/fZi4rRSQS8

My First Twitter Bot: A Journey into Twitter's API

• February 01, 2021
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

Sometime around Thanksgiving/November 2020, I formalized the idea that I would actually build a Twitter bot for the sake of novelty and as an experiment/learning exercise. One night at suppertime, we discussed what might be cool as a bot and those ideas are still on the list as possibilities for the future. Ultimately, I settled on a bot idea that built on some things I've used in the past (Google API) so I wouldn't have to learn All The Things in addition to building a bot and figuring out the Twitter API.

Pushing Data Into Google Sheets Sheets (Yes, Multiples)

• June 22, 2020
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

If you recall from the last tech post about pushing data directly into Google Sheets, I promised a follow-up regarding the process of adding multiple sheets worth of data to a given parent sheet.

Programmatically Push Data to Google Sheets

• June 08, 2020
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

I've written in the past about the ability to ship files to Google Drive via its REST API and PHP, which is a super-cool process in and of itself. In the last few months, I've been moving more and more of our internal data shipping processes to Google Shared Drives for ease of end user access. As folks started working remotely, moving data to Google has solved several support burdens regarding access and such.

Character-Perfect Fixed Width Import Files

• May 25, 2020
• automation, php, tech

One of my springtime projects at work was to button up a recently-refreshed process to transmit some billing data between systems. By 'recently-refreshed,' I mean 'finally made a process whereby a human doesn't have to manually generate a file which had been the de-facto process for the better part of twelve years. Due to the cascading effects of some staff turnover in the unit in question, IT was brought into the loop to help find a better way to work this process.

TRIM-ming up for Summer

• March 09, 2020
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

Not really TRIM-ming for summer, but taking the opportunity to briefly write about Rule #1 when dealing with unknown (or incoming) data.

Sanitize. Thy. Inputs.

Without going into great detail (as it doesn't matter at the end of the day), last week I encountered a vendor that apparently doesn't know how to do this very well. Or at all. What ultimately transpired is the complete failure of a reasonably-routine change process to capture a critical failure in production.

Batch Ship Data to Google Team Drive

• June 17, 2019
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief bit about capturing webcam images. This post expands on the initial process: specifically, what to do with the images once procured.

Capturing Your Internet-Connected Webcam Images

• June 02, 2019
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

Over the years, we've had a few public Internet-connected cameras pointing at various places around campus. We've used them for publicity and other purposes since the mid-1990's, and starting in around 2010 would sometimes be called upon to create a sort of time-lapse video of activity from one of said cameras.

Auto-Transpose Data

• March 18, 2019
• tech, php, automation

Many years ago, an individual in our office retired and the position was not replaced. For several reasons, this was an appropriate decision: the landscape of IT and our localized service portfolio had, for lack of a better phrase, stabilized. Our team was more often innovating in ways involving or prioritizing partnerships over custom builds or infrastructure requirements. We were appropriately consuming centralized services made available as a commodity.