> When the second COVID vaccine doses opened up, all of the slots were full. It turned out that the website’s backend had an API, so I wrote a script to poll th

> When the second COVID vaccine doses opened up, all of the slots were full. It turned out that the website’s backend had an API, so I wrote a script to poll the API every 60 seconds or so and watch for cancellations and notify me so that I could get an earlier appointment. I imagine the hacked together COVID vaccination websites were already under quite a high load. If it's anything like unoptimized WordPress websites it's doing a database query each time and I really hope the API wasn't being shared by healthcare providers. The saving grace appears to be that the script isn't shared. I guess this is a reminder to be careful when sharing scripts that rely on other's services (especially important services). Cache when possible, poll minimally, etc. Recently I found out that Ubuntu doesn't cache DNS queries by default, which I discovered when I got temporarily blocked from a DNS server. Good job I didn't share that script!