Big day of firsts

#python #blog #automation

I've been a lurker of dev.to for a while wanting to post something but haven't had anything awfully interesting happen. I recently had an idea for something I'd like to automate that takes a few minutes out of my day. After creating the tool I realised it might be applicable for everyone else so also published it publicly on GitHub, my first public repo!

Little bit of a background on me, I'm primarily a C#/JS developer working for a small startup specialising in wearable technology. I've been working as a full-time software developer for almost a year now and have been loving nearly every moment.

Now, back to business.

This was my first python project created with self direction. I've done a small snippet or two for uni assignments back in the day but nothing within the last few years. Each day I spend around about a minute writing happy birthday posts on my friends walls on facebook, an idea came to automate this process and write a script that automatically wishes my friends a happy birthday each day! I do realise that there are people on my friends list that I haven't talked to for years or don't really like anymore but what harm could a happy birthday post do.

I've posted the GitHub repo here.

Essentially this tool will login under your account, navigate to calendar view of birthdays today and post a random birthday greeting from birthday.cfg to each persons wall. Feel free to customise the birthday greetings, can also use $name which should just be their first name to personalise each message if you'd like.

It doesn't use proper waiting at the moment for each page to load before continuing and just uses fixed delays, I might try implement that later if possible. Saw some potential issues with selenium and ajax pages so figured I'd take a shortcut or two.

I'm currently scheduling it to run every morning using windows task scheduler and a little batch file. So far we're two days in and it's worked fine on both days :)

Hoping to do a lot more little projects like this as it was quite fun figuring out how a lot of this stuff works and the possibilities of web automation.