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My wife works as a school administrator, and has been spending the last few nights with her laptop updating the free school meals end dates for all the eligible

My wife works as a school administrator, and has been spending the last few nights with her laptop updating the free school meals end dates for all the eligible kids, one by one via the web UI, because there is no automated option to do it in bulk. This type of situation can be multiplied a millionfold across organisations and businesses, and I honestly don't know what the general solution is. Creators of software can't anticipate every need, and similarly you can't exactly publish a data model and give users a SQL prompt and expect that to end well. The best we can do is shrink the gap between developers and users so that the very low-hanging obvious fruit is implemented at least.

totetsu 5y ago
Sounds like a job for burp Intruder or something. Get the API call and get a list of student ID numbers and send them all without using the gui
johannes1234321 5y ago
> Creators of software can't anticipate every need This is one of the reasons why software development is so expensive. You really have to find those small little "business processes" and translate them into clear rules a computer can work with and keep a usable user interface. Without domain knowledge this is really hard. This also is why the world runs in Excel. Somebody smart in the business unit starts with collecting all info in Excel and slowly builds more and more complex macros into it whenever they have a need. The larger the distance between the business and development the harder it is to capture all those small edges.
gumby 5y ago
> Creators of software can't anticipate every need, and similarly you can't exactly publish a data model ... and expect that to end well. People don’t want to expose a schema and API, especially for programs like that, because at that instant all their decisions become frozen and turn into technical debt. Any change to the schema would break all the unknown little hacks written by customers. I don’t think there’s a good long term fix

totetsu 5y ago

Sounds like a job for burp Intruder or something. Get the API call and get a list of student ID numbers and send them all without using the gui

johannes1234321 5y ago

> Creators of software can't anticipate every need This is one of the reasons why software development is so expensive. You really have to find those small little "business processes" and translate them into clear rules a computer can work with and keep a usable user interface. Without domain knowledge this is really hard. This also is why the world runs in Excel. Somebody smart in the business unit starts with collecting all info in Excel and slowly builds more and more complex macros into it whenever they have a need. The larger the distance between the business and development the harder it is to capture all those small edges.

gumby 5y ago

> Creators of software can't anticipate every need, and similarly you can't exactly publish a data model ... and expect that to end well. People don’t want to expose a schema and API, especially for programs like that, because at that instant all their decisions become frozen and turn into technical debt. Any change to the schema would break all the unknown little hacks written by customers. I don’t think there’s a good long term fix