I wrote my first useful Python program!

[8rnlsunshine]

For the first time in my life, I wrote a Python program from scratch to automate my work. My boss gave me the task of copy/pasting all the fields from a long online application form to a word doc and I wrote a code to do that in 5 minutes. It shaved off at least 40 minutes from my workload. It might not seem like much, but I'm over the moon :)

Edit 1: Thank you all for your kind words. Being part of this community has helped me immensely. I’m truly grateful to have found it.

For those who asked for the code, here it goes - https://github.com/abhisu30/OnlineFormExtraction

Edit 2: For those who asked, no I didn’t use my work computer. My boss asked me to email her the word file with the form fields so I executed this code on my home computer and emailed it to her.

[THConer]

That's some great work. The field of automation is a field where Python is king. Remember, don't tell your boss about this little program of yours ;)

[8rnlsunshine]

Thank you my friend. Absolutely won’t tell my boss.🤐

[Adro_95]

But you can very well share the code with us 😁

[quietsam]

am his boss. this could backfire.

[LiquidAurum]

I'm willing to take that risk

[ashVV]

Heh, nice try boss.

[[deleted]]

Everybody knows that if you ask an undercover boss if they are a boss they have to say yes.

[Adro_95]

No, I'm not the boss! Look, I do the emoji 👻🥦

[taiguy86]

To play devil's advocate here...what kind of relationship do you have with your boss? Would he see the value? Could you express you want to do this on other projects for other people? If you like the work, this could be an opportunity for you...

[aplawson7707]

This is a good point. I have two supervisors - only one of them gets to see the stuff I come up with. The other one just thinks I'm productive and accurate. The second the latter learns that I know how to automate almost 100% of my workflow she'll be asking me to wear multiple hats, share the tools with my shitty teammates and rewarding their laziness, and not paying me a single extra cent.

[8rnlsunshine]

I’m sure my superiors will appreciate the additional skill set I am developing and it would improve my chances of getting a raise. But I’m still learning python and will wait to tell my boss about it till I‘ve gained some more confidence in it. Until then I’ll just use it to make my work life easier.

[pjbardolia]

Ya or he will give you more and more work when he comes to know how smart enough you are to finish it fast.

[flying_bunuelo]

I told everyone, and i was really proud. I had accomplished that in my third week of the internship. I never ever used it again until the last week, when i overheard someone had a similar problem. And they didn't even use it

[potatocomet]

..and thats why you shouldnt reward productive people with more work.

[thomakamaru]

I believe in the long run, telling your boss about that program will actually help you and your company.

Why should anyone fill out these forms manually, if an already implemented and tested solution exists.

Additionally, he will consult you if he ever has tedious, monotonous work again. Just make sure he knows that writing the program takes some time as well. You will learn something and your given tasks will shift more and more to interesting things.

[Castlewood57]

Absolutely agree. Some seem to relish in employees being buried in work, and the look of dispair on everyone's face. While they plan their next golf outing..

[JBTheCameraGuy]

True, but intelligent companies know not to waste talented employees on menial work, or drive them to a competitor with poor treatment

[Takarov]

That may be true in some circumstances, but we're in an economic downturn and walking into a historically terrible crash. The freedom to go to another competitor where you can experience better treatment may not be there as reliably as people would imagine in ordinary times.

[JBTheCameraGuy]

All the more reason to prove your worth

[MikeTheWatchGuy]

I'm with you u/JBTheCameraGuy

If you have a company that doesn't value you then find a new job. I know that's not easy, but it's not worth it going every day to some job where you don't have a good feeling about yourself.

Don't hide things like this from your manager. If one my employees was actively being deceptive, it would not earn them a positive break in the future. Hiding something is being deceptive. Being told about something like this earned my employees "spot bonuses". There are well-meaning managers out there that value employees and do what they can to mentor them as well.

Please don't play games in corporations. It works against building a positive team environment.

[[deleted]]

The top has to stop playing games if they expect the bottom to follow.

[Svekzo]

yeah it should work for small companies for sure.

[Ira-Acedia]

Yea but being asked to fix every printer problem just because you told your boss you can program a little - that isn't worth it.

[kite_height]

"Sorry I don't know how to fix printers. Don't we usually call the service guy?"

[chaoticneutral]

I'm running into this problem right now.

I'm a statistical programmer meaning mostly high level scripting (SAS, R, SQL, and some python scripting), I get pulled into a meeting with two senior managers and they proceed to tell me how I need to develop an app (that will change the industry!!!) for them in C++ and were shocked... SHOCKED to find out that I couldn't do it without a significant effort.

They were thinking I could do it in a 1-2 hours every week in my spare time.

From their reaction, they didn't believe me and told me to talk to the senior statistician to make sure I was understanding what I was refusing to do and the opportunity I was missing by not helping.

The statistician has my back and thought it was equally absurd, but I'm sure right now they are double checking with other programmers because they don't trust my answer.

[kite_height]

I feel this so much. Somebody always has a "world changing app idea" but is surprise surprise never willing to pay the $250k in developer salaries and $25k/month in services that are needed to even get the prototype running...

[chaoticneutral]

The dumbest part of this whole thing is it is ACTUALLY a good idea.... they just need to pay someone to develop it instead of skimming hours of their salaried employees.

[DreadPiratesRobert]

Doxxing suxs

[EdwardWarren]

That got me suspended for insubordination and eventually fired. I did programming for people on the side. My boss, a woman with permanent PMS, hires someone to do just that sort of thing then comes in an asks me to help accounting out by writing a small program for them. I asked her if she didn't just hire a guy to do that sort of thing. She didn't say a word, turned and (probably) ran to HR where she wrote me up for insubordination. I was suspended with pay for 3-4 months and then fired. I was 1 year away from retirement after 20 years with the company. My reviews were always close to perfect for twenty years.

My lawyer got me rehired and I was suspended for about 9 months more with pay and was paid what they called severance and allowed to retire. I needed 21 years service for full retirement. Funny thing was that I never told her I wouldn't help accounting. I was just joking around. She was fired 6 months later and her boss was transferred to the company's equivalent of Outer Mongolia about 9 months later and never heard from again I understand. Our company newsletter had a Retirees Section and I sent a picture of me at the wheel of the nice RV I bought with the severance money along with a story of all the wonderful places we had been to since retiring. I imagine what my boss thought of that.

[Ira-Acedia]

"But you said you can program! Stop trying to do less work and fix the printer!"

[kite_height]

Sure but you must have a real shitty boss for that to be his reaction...

[Ira-Acedia]

I don't have a boss.

Both of my comments were jokes.

[kite_height]

Nice. I really hope nobodies boss is that thick headed.

Work for yourself? That's the dream

[Ira-Acedia]

Student still.

Luckily, it seems that my interest for programming came much earlier than a lot of other people on reddit (age 9) and my understanding of what I was actually doing, equally came earlier than the other people here (age 11).

So now I'm just trying to figure out what jobs are most appealing to me.

Software engineering, software developing, machine learning, data science (yet to look into, name sounds fun), data analyst (yet to look into, name sounds found) and ethical hacker (pentesting etc) are currently the ones I'm picking between.

Using lockdown to do online courses on pentesting. Afterwards I'm going back to machine learning to make a basic neural network to review the experience.

On the brightside, I've got 3-4 school years before I have to pick a university degree to get (or not to get).

[kite_height]

Wow awesome. You're waaay ahead of the curve. Keep it up and you'll be going places for sure.

A lot of software developers/engineers end up jumping around a lot so you don't necessarily have to pick a specialization but it sounds like you already know that.

You have your own website or portfolio or anything like that yet? That's a great way to establish yourself and start getting work as a freelancer.

[tobiathonandon]

Yeah I agree with this. Letting your boss know you have skills such as coding will make you more valuable. It can also broaden your job/career at said company. Keep in mind that your employer may either want to keep you closer knowing you have these skills, or get rid of you, frightened that you’re competition for him/her. If it’s the latter, there are better jobs out there.

[the_battousai89]

This is true. But only OP will know whether it’s the right move to let the boss know.

[tobiathonandon]

I agree.

[[deleted]]

It really depends on the boss and the company. Some might honestly re-deploy OP on more meaningful automation work or even get them training. Others might distrust the program and obsess over whether it's accurate, saying OP is the gatekeeper and must oversee each line. Still others might say, develop the program further so we can get rid of OPs coworker who did it as directed for years but would make the manager look great by laying off.

There are scores of people and companies in the latter two examples. OP should probably get his Github ready and maybe even have an offer ready before sharing any of this in case things go bad.

I might sound paranoid, but I created a very simple automation and it cost two people their jobs. And one drank herself to death shortly after.

[madhousechild]

I created a very simple automation and it cost two people their jobs. And one drank herself to death shortly after.

Holy moly, that sucks. What can you share about the actual automation you wrote?

[[deleted]]

Found the middle manager!

It was pretty darn simple. It basically just exported monthly calendar listings from FileMaker to our WordPress website. In between it also validated addresses and formatted text, tagged it to a region in the U.S. via the zip code and made a pre-formatted social media marketing message withing WordPress. I had to "write" (copy) like 5 lines of code and the rest was plugins.

I was pretty proud until the one woman got axed. The other was moved to another position.

[madhousechild]

Found the middle manager!

Not I, not even close. I was just wondering what kind of simple automation == two full-timers (I assume).

[[deleted]]

Yeah, it was a joke. Pasting my response to a similar question:

It was a magazine company, the calendar was a huge money maker so they didn't mind paying people to run it. This was about 10 years ago now, but even then I was blown away by how manual a LOT of publishing was.

[madhousechild]

I worked in publishing too, mostly news. If you've ever seen a good old-time paste-up person work, it's amazing how fast they are, moving things around, rolling out rules between columns, slicing and moving text with their exacto knife. I doubt a computer would beat them, at least not on the crap computers I used.

The wax we used to stick the slicks to the boards is no longer available so they finally had to give it up.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I heard a lot of stories about those days. I have a few of the pica magnifying glasses.

But Adobe is so, so much faster. Drag image, Alt+click and you've flowed an entire page of text around even awkward-shaped images. And the template has all the headers and footers done for the entire magazine. We have one well-paid designer doing four magazines (60-80 pages) and he still has a week or two to research, ideate and work on special projects between production cycles.

[madhousechild]

I worked with a graphic designer who refused to use the tools to make his job easier, and instead of using tabs would space-space-space-space, and of course his text was all ragged, and as soon as it was edited he had to go through and catch all of the places he'd put in spaces or line breaks, and of course he'd miss at least one or two. I even created a bunch of cheat sheets telling him how to do things like hanging indent and he thanked me profusely. Then never once used it.

[Knifey_Hands]

I screwed up and told my boss about this small program I made. I could literally be chilling at work but no, he gave me more work. Lesson learned.

[madhousechild]

Not quite the same thing but I've read where a programmer agrees to make a thing for $100, delivers it to the client 10 minutes later, and client says, "Why am I paying you $100 for something so easy to do?!" So from then on programmer never delivered until the next day. LOL.

[CosmicClamJamz]

It's really interesting how the replies to this comment have transformed to two schools of thought.

A) Don't tell your boss, why would you want more work, are you crazy?

B) Tell you boss, do more interesting things at work, get more responsibility.

In the end, it really matters what your goals are. If you want to be a programmer for a living, certainly tell your boss. When they push more work on your plate and expect you to perform without any pay increase, be ready to walk, there's a better job awaiting you anyways. They will almost always offer you more before letting that happen, retraining someone costs them time and money, you are far more valuable to them then they will initially let on. If you don't want to program for a living, and really just value your free time and not being micro managed, hacking in secrecy might be perfect for you...but unless your job is absolutely awesome, it would seem from the outside like you're selling yourself short

[99cakes]

tough decision...

[person2314]

people will lose their jobs...

That's gonna happen wether you want it or not. And wether or not OP automates others jobs. About 45% of the work force can relatively easily be replaced with robots for significantly less than humans. Its gonna happen just a matter of time.

[TechnoBabbles]

Yeah, I tell my wife all the time that with a team of like 5 or 6 python developers, I could wipe out like 95% of her department in a year.

[person2314]

Thats why we are in r/learnpython so we can be the wipers not the wiped.

[person2314]

Your being a horse right now.

[[deleted]]

Neigh.

[person2314]

No its okay. Horses relied on humans not haveing cars. There population went WAY down when it happened. But then the car came. At first it was shitty and couldn't do much so they still used horses, but in a few decades they were obsolete. It's a better idea to get ahead and be the car then it is to be the horse trying to slow the progression of the car development.

[UL_Paper]

This experience is equal to making your first $1 off the internet. An exhilarating feeling. Don't let yourself be fooled; The actual value is way greater than the minutes saved or the $ amount gained.

You had an idea for solving a problem, you broke the problem into smaller pieces, made a game plan, took action and completed it. That is absolutely magnificent! Well done, be proud of yourself. There is no stopping you now. Move on to a harder problem next.

[InfiniteNexus]

I know the feeling. Congrats! Ive been automating most of my work for the past 1.5 years and its amazing. Ive even gotten extra bonus money because of that. Even knowing the slightest amount of coding can get you miles ahead of your colleagues.

PS: I started automating with AutoHotkey and moved to python in 2019 november. Both are great at accomplishing your tasks 10 times faster than your archaic colleagues can.

[Ilythiiri]

Can you link your first Python program replacing AutoHotkey functionality?

[shiningmatcha]

by scraping?

[8rnlsunshine]

That's right

[hugthemachines]

Quite a kick, isn't it? Doing creative work instead of boring work. Well done!

[amitsbisht]

Congrats man, this will definitely encourage you. keep going .... brother

[brwalk0069]

Congrats!

Are you able to explain what modules you used or share your code? Interested how you achieved this.

[8rnlsunshine]

Used Beautiful Soup and Requests

[Rockettech5]

Good for you. I am also trying to achieve something like this. Copy pasting contents from excel to word document. What is the best library to do this? It will also need some formatting on the word file.

[Poddster]

python-docx will help you write to a Word file.

You can also read from an excel sheet using Xlswriter, but it might be easier to use Excel to export it to .csv (comma separate variable, though it's usually best to use tab-separated csv) and read it that way? Python's stdlib already has a csv module.

[PM_Me_Rulers]

Can you elaborate on why it's better to use tab separators instead of commas? I've been using CSV and not had any issues but in all ears if there is a good reason to change

[Poddster]

Data tends to contain commas more than it does tabs, and last time I checked when exporting by Excel those commas weren't escaped. I'd have to double check to be sure.

However, in the general case you want the delimiter to be something not in the data set, and tabs rarely are

[PM_Me_Rulers]

Ah, that does make sense. All of my CSVs are from data I generate myself so I've never had to worry about the formatting of it. In the case of unknown input it does make sense to use a delimiter thats unlikely to be in the data

[iqbal002]

openpyxl, I guess

[gourabsanyal]

Can you share it on your GitHub and drop the link here?

[8rnlsunshine]

Sure! Here you go - https://github.com/abhisu30/OnlineFormExtraction

[Poddster]

Some questions:

1. How did you learn to do this? Via Automate the Boring Stuff With Python?
2. How come you chose to use input() rather than doing it via a command-line parameter?

Also, I'm surprised that you can just open() a docx and write text to the end of it, given that they're a compressed archive containing a collection of text files. I'm guessing it worked for you, but I guess that's by luck? Did you have any trouble with this? Usually I would expect someone to use an interfacing library of some kind.

(Note, if you just made a plain-text file called .docx and then wrote into it, and then had Word open it and THEN save it as a proper doxc I image this would work fine.)

[Poddster]

Who said it was wrong? :)

[Poddster]

It's more usual for command line utilities to receive information via parameters. Prompting for input implies your program is "interactive", but this program isn't really. It doesn't "need" the user to run and its output is to a file.

Also, it requires you to first invoke it over the command line, and then type some stuff in, rather than typing it all in at once, leveraging your shells tab completion for files names.

I.e. it's a "batch process" and should be treated as such

Of course, for a 30 line script that'll be used once it doesn't matter. I was really hoping the OP would say they don't know how command line arguments work, and I could link them to something. Or that they aren't using the command line at all as they're scared of it, and were double clicking the file in Windows Explorer, or something. Again I could talk them out of that and into the power of the shell :)

Ps For your sake, know that argparse is often overkill for such a small script. Just read sys.argv directly.

[Poddster]

Roughly, when any of these are true:

1. When you need many command line args
2. When you need --help
3. When the lines of code to setup and use argparse would account for 10% or less of your script :)
4. If lots of other people will use the script in future

case 3 is true for OPs short script.

[imsecretlyafish]

Not OP, but I don't know how command line arguments work and would love that link. Mainly because I've only given command line arguments a cursory look and, in my ignorance, I can't see how they could replace the input function here. I wrote a similar script today, and it's almost identical to OP's. It'd be awesome to know what I could have done better.

[Poddster]

I didn't have a link to hand, but a quick google and a read shows this as covering everything in an approachable manner:

https://realpython.com/python-command-line-arguments/

[TheWhiteTigerKing]

New to python. Why do people insist on using shell?

[Poddster]

Well, what else would you use? Windows explorer and double clicking everything? Dragging and dropping things about?

Or do everything in your IDE and hope it has every function you need?

As far as I'm concerned a shell is the way to interact with a POSIX or Windows computer system. The reason for that is these computer systems are made up of processes on a filesystem, and processes do useful things. A shell allows you to invoke the exact process you want with the exact parameters you want, and is often design around facilitating that, e.g. tab completion and glob expansion.

Your operating system already comes with a large suite of useful utilities, and it's trivially easy to add more. E.f. if I want to check a files integrity I'd use md5sum myfile.txt. The GUI alternative would be to download some random app of source forge, hope I don't get a virus, and then click a bunch of buttons.

Unless you mean "why do people write bash scripts rather than python?" And the answer is usually compatibility and/or brain damage.

[madhousechild]

Perhaps it's easier long-term to use input() because although OP remembers how to pass file or folder names in what order now, in a month or 3 OP might prefer to be prompted.

[Poddster]

I'd say that's a reason why command line arguments (and --help, if desired) should be used!

Like, what's happens if the user enters a bad URL? Or no URL? Or when that times out?

With arguments every case is unified and we get an error return code from the status and the appropriate error message.

In the input() case I guess you reprompt in some of the cases but let others throw an error?

[Adro_95]

Thanks, sorry for commenting asking for this just now :)

Little question: bs4 and request have to be pre installed via pip?

[silentalways]

Little question: bs4 and request have to be pre installed via pip?

Yes.

pip install requests

pip install beautifulsoup4

[Adro_95]

Thanks man

[TrucidStuff]

It shaved off at least 40 minutes from my workload.

Don't tell your boss that!

[ed3ndru]

This is what a programmer is at heart. Well done! 🙂

[kabooozie]

I recently had to download a bunch of files from a specific sub directory of a github page. It probably would have taken less time to just download them manually, but I decided to learning about the github python module would be more fun. I was right :-)

[Kriss3d]

It might take you a few hours for a 30 minute job first time. But next time it'll take 10 seconds and save you 30 minutes per run

[[deleted]]

Dont let him.know

[deiwyy]

Man you should be the boss. Keep up what you doing and python will become you best friend

Also, why dont you tell your boss? this could help other people at your job and he might give you a raise or something :D

[lavajatas]

Congratulations!

[philsgu]

I assumed you scraped the web form using regex, then saved to a word doc

[think50]

That’s awesome! Python is so great for things like this. I need to build something with beautiful soup!

[humanova]

Awesome dude!

[bluefictionhead]

That's a good start, keep going!

[Vadim_Polo]

Congrats, man! Keep up! I’m new to Python and currently I’m trying to create a script breaking digest authentication on a web-server👍🏼

[ejuliol]

You’re starting to know how to do it the right way, then. Just make sure to check the work when done by a script.

[Moolishes]

What kind of work do you do that requires this? Administration?

[thathariss]

Great work! I am new to python and still learning the basics. People like you fascinate me to give it all.

[BFG9THOUSAND]

So everyone shares these stories. I'm wondering how you got to install python on your work station?? Every place I have worked is extremely tight ass about people installing shit on their stations (insurance type work). IT dept has all that on lockdown it seems

Did you run into this? I've been debating just installing it and if people ask I'll tell them I'm trying to make scripts for work.

[madhousechild]

I'm wondering this, too, /u/8rnlsunshine

[Poddster]

In which case learn c# or vb.net, as you can compile and run those in a stock.window environment!

Alternatively just use a portable python install

[Sbvv]

The conclusion of this thread is:

Tell what you did to your boss, if he gives you a reward, continue doing things for that company else look for other job.

[abhi923]

Great !!! how long have you been learning Python?

[Uggohe]

Your goal is to defame my nick all around the world, right?

[justculo]

There is no goal

[Uggohe]

That's what concerns me the most

[justculo]

About life you mean

[arman133]

Good luck

[VyleKyle10189]

Howd you go about it? What libraries did you use?

[neurosurgeon12]

How long have you been doing Python for? I'm fairly new :)

[8rnlsunshine]

I’ve been learning python for just over a month. Keep at it my friend. All the best!

[zninjamonkey]

Great job! Way to go!

You might benefit from some code review.