Larry Wall (creator of the programming language Perl, among other things) once said that the three great virtues of a computer programmer were laziness, impatience, and hubris. Laziness, because it drives you to make labor-saving tools, and to document them so you don't have to answer questions; impatience, because it drives you to maximize the efficiency of systems, and to create programs that anticipate your needs; and hubris, because it drives you to make your programs ones that others won't say bad things about.
And I look over at the Daily Theatre Database, for which I have written programs to:
Check Twitter to see whether a new episode translation has been posted (because I don't want to be on Twitter all the time)
Retrieve the posting from Twitter (because opening Twitter just to download an image is a hassle)
Put that into the database along with metadata like who's talking and who's being mentioned (because it's cleaner to have a program to do that than changing flags in a database directly(
Scan the image with OCR to provide a text alternative (because accessibility is important and I didn't want to type everything out manually)
Clean up that machine-generated text (because OCR tools are still a bit iffy, but in a predictable way)
And I just now wrote a script that takes those transcriptions and changes them into the format I've been using for after-the-cut transcriptions here, because I got tired of reformatting them for Tumblr by hand.
Now, this is still only a semi-automated system, which means that I have to invoke a number of these programs myself when I'm notified of the Twitter posting, instead of them chugging along as soon as it happens. So there's possibly room for increased laziness. On the other hand, that bit of laziness came in handy the other day when the staff had to retract a theatre episode because they posted the wrong one, and I could back it out of the database without causing some kind of pileup.
So I'm going to celebrate my virtuous lifestyle by taking a nap.
