Ages ago, I had a second job as a speed-dating host for a social events company. I did it partly for the (beer) money, partly to meet women at her other social

Ages ago, I had a second job as a speed-dating host for a social events company. I did it partly for the (beer) money, partly to meet women at her other social events for free (she charged for them), and partly to get her brash-but-actually-quite-useful online dating advice (that helped me find my now-wife, now that I think about it!). The basic premise was simple: get 10-20 people into a hip restaurant or bar, set up tables, have women pick the tables they sit at, then have the men go from table to table having five-minute conversations. After everything was said and done, everyone would write the names of people they wanted to see again on a form and hand them to me. I would manually go through each form and send emails to matches after the event was over. I also had a 24-hour soft SLO and a hard 72-hour SLO. This usually took me a whole 2-3 hours to do per event. I also mismatched people several times because humans gonna human. I was very fluent in PowerShell at the time, so upon realizing that this can be automated with a matrix solver, I wrote a script that took the names of everyone that submitted a form, then, name by name, asked for everyone's matches, and sent everyone their match emails from a template I wrote. It took me about six hours to write and run through manual tests. (I know better now and use TDD for everything!) My 2-3 hour error prone process went down to five minutes, tops, with no errors. It was beautiful. Towards the end of my stint doing this job, I was able to run this script _as people gave me back their forms_ and have emails queued up to send out once everyone was gone. I spent the remaining 2.95 hours I got back walking to my favorite izakaya and eating their amazing pork belly rice bowl. Thanks, Julia, for making me miss my twenties for the first time in a while! (I've written several small utility apps over the ages. It's a shame when I hear people say that they actively don't program outside of work; the ability to write code to bend the world to your will is an amazing superpower!)