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Any chance you've written about this side project and the areas you learned about and how to figured those things out?

• nurettin 7y ago
  This is probably the first and only time it was mentioned in public. I do have a private bitbucket graveyard where it resides. Oh and this was done when mongodb was still a thing, so I have some of that going in there for finding sparse stock correlation matrices. And ruby was everywhere at the time, so the bank interface was created in watir instead of puppeteer.
  • shostack 7y ago
    Interesting. I've been working on automating some personal finance Google Sheet stuff trying to use watir to automate pulling stuff from Mint. Did you find watir useful for things like this? Or would you say there's ultimately better options for a personal Rails app?
    • nurettin 7y ago
      google sheets is awesome, they even let you reply to rudimentary get requests and define your own functions with google script. I think it is a hidden gem. Watir lets you host your own headless firefox or google chrome on a cheap server thanks to the headless gem. All headless does is to start Xvfb and let you execute the browser in it. What I really like in watir's interface is the wait_for functionality which you can sprinkle everywhere in order to wait until a button or a dropdown is actually rendered by javascript so you can click on it once it is queryable. These days I use websockets and chrome puppeteer protocol to talk to the browser. It is somewhat faster and more robust than the chromiumdriver, but if I had to use watir again, I wouldn't mind it.