Topic: Personal Automation

If you’ve ever sat down at your computer to do the same thing that you’ve ever done before… what are you even thinking, how can you call yourself a progammer.

Well, OK, that was a little harsh. We often find ourselves doing repetitive tasks manually anyway because software and websites are rarely written to be easy to automate. But there are tools to help get around that oversight, and we’ll play with three of them:

  • SeleniumIDE, a tool popular for testing for web developers, but also useful for driving a web browser for personal reasons

  • SikuliX, a very intuitive computer-vision based tool that’s not limited to web applications, and can also be a nice introduction to programming

  • MechanicalSoup, a Python library for browser automation that’s based in webscraping technology

As usual, bring your grab bag of questions, thoughts, news, and projects in or about any language to throw in the soup. We always have a good discussion.

Changed meeting location!

Innovation Hub - not Brixx!

We’re going to try meeting in the Innovation Hub, a gorgeous new facility that’s part of the renovated Dayton Arcade complex. Enter through the doors that face the Wright Stop Plaza bus hub.

Of course, there won’t be helpful wait staff offering to sell us dinner, but there’s a Subway just outside the Innovation Hub entrance. Feel free to bring a meal in with you.

Street parking is free in the evening. I usually park on Ludlow Street.

or

if for any reason coming downtown doesn’t work for you (for instance, you’ve converted yourself to purely digital format and now exist as a set of cloud-hosted algorithms), we’ll be online as well!

Join us at 7 PM EDT on the PyFri Discord channel, discord.gg/9SgTh3T, and click on the General voice chat link. You may need to install the Discord desktop app rather than just using the web interface.