Thread by @Nexuist

At my first internship we had to build a Windows Server app that would allow a user to drag and drop bunch of spreadsheets into a network folder and generate a summary report. This was previously a task that required ~900 man hrs that would get reduced to ~10 seconds

My coworker and I got started on a PoC python script to generate the report, and after talking to the stakeholders I scheduled a demo a month out. This would give us enough time to test everything and make sure the server could go live that day

Unfortunately I am really bad at time and also stupid so I thought June came after July. I meant to schedule the demo a month out but I actually scheduled it for one day later

Stakeholders immediately replied to the invite, “wow I can’t believe it’ll be ready so early! You guys are the best interns we’ve ever had!”

Panic sets in cause we can’t cancel now and I was also a dick to my coworker by springing this deadline on him and killing his night

We can’t even procure a Windows server in a day; this is an enterprise environment where you have to file a ticket and wait two weeks for IT to reply. But hang on, we didn’t really need a server, we just needed a Python script. So we spend the night working on that

Demo day rolls around and we prepare a devious plan. We’d take my laptop to the conference room but leave my coworker’s at our shared desk. Right before the demo, he’d leave to “go to the bathroom,” but actually go back to his laptop to stare at the folder

I got one stakeholder to send some spreadsheets that I then drag and dropped to the folder. My buddy ran the Python script over them from his desk and manually put the report back in the folder. From my laptop screen it looked like it just magically appeared. Day is saved

Our stakeholders are so impressed, in fact, that one of them immediately drops the path of the folder in a group chat so everyone else on the team can start using it. It’s automated after all, right? 😭

Bro is now stuck staring at this folder forever running a Python script every few minutes. The end of the day is approaching, and he’s going to have to log off. But the Europeans are going to wake up and want to use the folder too. Do we pretend the server crashed overnight?

At this point I remember our team has an Android tablet we used to control the speakers in our office downstairs, and Android can run Python right? So we go down there to install a terminal emulator and then figure out the right Bash commands to get Android to interact with SMB

Then we install Python, sftp a Bash script that watches our SMB network folder every 5 seconds and handles producing the report with our Python script, and also install Tasker to make sure our folder watcher launches every time the tablet turns on

Anyways this is all a very long and convoluted way of saying: if you work at a Fortune 500 company and your office has a tablet you use to control Spotify, you may not want to get rid of it, or else the entire international accounting department will be very very angry at you

“Well ackshually this is made up; no IT department would ever allow a Spotify tablet onto the enterprise network” buddy I was as surprised as you would be to find that we had an IoT popcorn maker MAC whitelisted on that network too

Made a cool Alexa skill with the popcorn machine that cooked popcorn when you asked but only when all the Jenkins pipelines were passing. But that’s a story for another day

Actually here’s another story from my early days you’ll like if you liked the OP

https://twitter.com/nexuist/status/1719439162661618025