Alright, let’s talk about this thing I worked on, called it ‘kisner’. No fancy reason for the name, honestly, just popped into my head one day while I was wrestling with this problem.
See, I had this task, a real pain. Involved grabbing a bunch of data from different places, mashing it together, and then spitting out some kind of report. Every single day. Click, copy, paste, format, save… you get the picture. Tedious stuff. Took up a good chunk of my morning. I thought, there’s gotta be a better way. I need to automate this mess.
Getting Started
So, I decided to build a little tool. That’s where ‘kisner’ came in. Fired up my usual editor, felt pretty confident. How hard could it be, right? Just needed to script out the steps I was already doing manually.
First part, grabbing the data. That actually went smoother than I expected. Found the files, read them in. Okay, cool. Felt like I was making real progress. Pat myself on the back.
The Process and the Problems
Then came the ‘mashing together’ part. This is where things got sticky. The data wasn’t always in the same format. Sometimes dates were weird, sometimes numbers had extra characters. Typical real-world messy data. So I started writing code to clean it up. Lots of checks, lots of rules. If this, then that. If that, then something else.
I spent quite a bit of time here. Testing with different messy files. Finding edge cases I hadn’t thought of. Fixing one thing seemed to break another. You know how it is. Standard debugging cycle. Get it working for one file, test with another, bang, it falls over.
- Check file format
- Clean up dates
- Handle missing values
- Combine everything
Eventually, I got the core logic working. It could take the usual inputs and produce something resembling the report I needed. Still rough, but it was something.
Things Got Complicated
And here’s where I probably went wrong. I thought, “This is working okay, but what if it could do more?” Big mistake.
First, I decided it should automatically archive the old data files. So I added code for that. Zipping them up, moving them to another folder. More testing, more things that could go wrong.
Then, I thought, “It should email me the report automatically!” Sounded great. But integrating email sending was a whole other can of worms. Authentication, formatting the email correctly, handling network issues… Suddenly my ‘simple’ script was getting bulky and complicated. It needed configuration files now. Error handling became way more complex.
I kept adding little ‘improvements’. A better logging system. A way to retry if a download failed. Each addition bolted onto the side, making the whole thing shaky.
The End Result?
Well, ‘kisner’ became this… thing. It mostly worked, but it was fragile. Sometimes it would just stop for no clear reason. Debugging it took longer than doing the original task manually! I’d spend an hour figuring out why the email part failed, or why the archiving didn’t kick in.
It wasn’t saving me time anymore. It was just changing how I spent my time – from doing the task to fixing the automation for the task.
In the end, I ripped out most of the fancy stuff I’d added. Went back to basics. Kept the data grabbing and the core processing part. Ditched the automatic emailing, ditched the complex archiving. It just spits out the report file now, and I handle the rest manually.
So yeah, that was my journey with ‘kisner’. Started simple, got greedy with features, and ended up with something overly complex and brittle. Learned a lesson about scope creep, I guess. Sometimes, just automating the most painful 80% is good enough. Trying to get that last 20% can sometimes cost you more than it’s worth. It works now, does the main job, and I stopped messing with it. Good enough.
