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Ask HN: Software gigs involving small, scripting-type tasks?
I love writing small, elegant programs--under 500 lines, say--that do one thing well. Scrape a website and dump the data to a CSV; take a directory full of video files and rename them based on the metadata; poll a JSON API for a retail site to check the price of an item and email someone if it decreases.
I like coding, but it isn't my passion, so it's hard to get my teeth into developing a big web app, or making small enhancements and bugfixes on someone else's. But I always love those little projects when I get the chance to do one. There are lots of non-programming fields that involve this kind of thing (data science, devops, IT, etc.). But are there fields or sub-industries of the software world wherein it's possible to do this kind of old-school scripting for a living?
- steve1011 11y agoYou could find applications in almost any field, given that there is work done on a computer or have access to one regularly. As for it being a big portion of daily work, I'd guess that most would be technically oriented, similar to those you listed (data science, dev ops, IT)
- byoung2 11y agohttps://www.fiverr.com/categories/programming-tech https://www.fiverr.com/categories/programming-tech sounds like it might be a possibility.
- 04rob 11y agoNot sure why you want to so quickly discount data science, dev ops, etc. But you could also consider many research areas in computer science that use light scripting to prove out new algorithms and techniques. Another area is computer security/pen testing.
- senjindarashiva 11y agoMost of my daily work involves the type of scripting you mention, granted we do have some bigger projects as well but we spend most of our time making small scripts. I work for a small "analysis house" (finance sector)
- curiousjorge 11y agodo you do a lot of web scraping? what sort of scripts are these designed to do?