> These tools capture our imagination, open new possibilities, and affect how we design our own systems.
Puppeteer/Playwright fits the bill for me. Learning how to scrape websites with those tools subtly changed how I approach lots of other programming tasks and opened many new possibilities in both personal and work projects.
The event model of the web platform has had a deep effect on how I generally think about systems.
Some people may throw tomatoes at me for this last one: Google Apps Script. The docs and API aren't great, but it has opened so many new possibilities for automation of things related to my personal and work Google accounts.
Re: capturing my imagination, physical computing with RPi/Arduino. I've also gotta admit that GenAI APIs have been an explosion of new possibilities for my line of work (technical writing)
Thank you to OP for creating a productive and inspiring topic (enlightenmentware) for us to discuss and share ideas around
Can you give some examples of what you've created with Google Apps Script?
I've used it a little, but it's one of those things I always spend an hour building up courage to attempt (because of the slow feedback loop, browser-based testing, confusion about different deployment types, permission models and extension types). In such ways it's the opposite of writing Emacs extensions, though I can see how it promises to give something similar in the end.
In a previous job I rigged up the submission of a Google Form to send out an FYI email to relevant stakeholders and to create a GitHub issue (glossing over the details of why this was useful)
Apps Script also has an API that essentially allows me to expose my spreadsheet data as a web service that returns the data as JSON
For a while I was doing daily journals in Google Docs. I used Apps Script to auto-populate the heading for each day, e.g. an H1 with the text "21 May 2024". I've done lots of little auto-population things like this
Puppeteer/Playwright fits the bill for me. Learning how to scrape websites with those tools subtly changed how I approach lots of other programming tasks and opened many new possibilities in both personal and work projects.
The event model of the web platform has had a deep effect on how I generally think about systems.
Some people may throw tomatoes at me for this last one: Google Apps Script. The docs and API aren't great, but it has opened so many new possibilities for automation of things related to my personal and work Google accounts.
Re: capturing my imagination, physical computing with RPi/Arduino. I've also gotta admit that GenAI APIs have been an explosion of new possibilities for my line of work (technical writing)
Thank you to OP for creating a productive and inspiring topic (enlightenmentware) for us to discuss and share ideas around