Readers like you keep news free for everyone.
More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.
For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away.
Flickr/slworking2
lifehacks
A programmer wrote scripts to automate his job, email his wife and make his coffee
Beautiful.
- Australia's largest state hits record-high COVID-19 cases despite weeks of strict lockdown. 'It's a tinderbox ready to explode,' one official said.
- eToro says crypto made up 73% of trading commissions in the last quarter, as retail customers dived in
- A flight attendant says she was too exhausted to report a passenger who shoved her when a flight was overbooked: report
- US jobless claims climb for first time in 5 weeks, to 353,000
IMAGINE YOU COULD automate parts of your life. That’s exactly what one programmer did.
It is part of a project that’s popular on GitHub, the website that hosts all kinds of software that programmers want to share with each other.
The project was shared by a programmer named Nihad Abbasov, known as Narkoz on the site. It consists of a bunch of software scripts with some funny but NSFW names.
Narkoz says that the scripts came from a another programmer. He tells the story like this: there was a programmer who left for another company, the type of guy that “if something — anything — requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that”.
After the guy left for a new job, his former coworkers were looking through his work and discovered that the guy had automated all sorts of crazy things, including parts of his job, his relationships, and making coffee.
The guy wrote one script that sends a text message “late at work” to his wife and “automatically picks reasons” from a preset list of them, describes Narkoz. It sent this text anytime there was activity with his login on the company’s computer servers after 9 pm.
He wrote another script relating to a customer he didn’t like, given the not-nice name he chose for this script. It scans his inbox for an email from the customer that uses words like “help,” “trouble,” and “sorry” and automatically rolls the guy’s database to the latest backup, then sends a reply: ”No worries mate, be careful next time.”
With another script, he automatically fired off an email excuse like “not feeling well, working from home” if he wasn’t at work and logged in to the servers by 8:45 am. He called that script “hangover.”
And the best one? He wrote a script that waits 17 seconds, then hacks into the coffee machine and orders it to start brewing a latte. The script tells the machine to wait another 24 seconds before pouring the latte into a cup, the exact time it takes to walk from the guy’s desk to the coffee machine.
And his coworkers didn’t even know the coffee machine was on the network and hackable.
Read: 6 ways your phone can improve your commute
Read: The secret to opening wine without a corkscrew has been revealed
