The most important Python script I ever wrote 

"Automate Everything": 1. Automate task A 2. Automate task B 3. Automate execution for task automation of A and B 4. Find a way to automate the automation in step 3 5. Keep building the automation tree

At a job I had, one of the more important clerical staff lost 4 hours a week, comparing Folder A to Folder B, and Folder B to Folder C, and nothing what had changed with what folders were added, or moved. I wrote a script that would daily create a directory listing, DIFF with yesterdays listing, produce a report of ADDs, MOVEs and DELETEs and email it to them daily, then make today's listing "yesterdays listing" for the next run. This saved them 4 wasted work weeks a year. In addition they had the changes daily now instead of weekly. Once that was available it turned out there were 7 or 8 other people who benefited from this information. I just changed the program to email them all. It is amazing how one little script can save so much time.

Not Python- but I automated a task using VBA in the first few weeks of my current role that I have no doubt was the reason they couldn’t keep someone in my role for more than a few weeks before they ran for the hills. Still using it most days and it literally saves me 20 hours a week.

Same story 🙂 Python automation has also helmed me make new friends in every department in the company. Your channel is great. Thank you.

Python is awesome. I automated a task with Python that was repetitive, that took about an hour every time. Now instead of me creating multiple CSV files from one large file with Excel manually (Excel struggles with a lot of data), Python does it with the run of a command in just a second.

I DIDN'T KNOW YOU COULD DO THIS!!! I mean... now that I think about it, I knew there were -programs- that did this... like Q&A testing type packages. This looks relatively simple, though!!! I had no idea! This is great! I also have a weekly thing I have to do for work that is tedious, and I've been thinking it could be scripted... but just assumed that would be way over my head. This will definitely help me get started! Thank you so much for posting this! (So glad it shows up on my feed!)

input() is a nice alternative to sleep you may like - it waits until you press enter in the shell, so you can wait as little or as much as you like.

Same experience, I used to work as a Data Entry Officer at an e-commerce company (nothing fancy here) but I can't stress this enough, 60% to 70% even till 80% of my tasks can be automated from changing product price, disabling it, adding promoted price for certain duration, changing its status to in/out of stock, changing product's description with a pre-defined description based on a given google sheet. Imagine doing this manually for 100+ of products, no thanks! I even helped our brand managers by fetching 100+ of production information from other vendors and competitors.

Well, that was such a cool and informative video that I had to leave a comment to help your RU-vid algorithm. Well done :)

Great example and helps inspire ideas for me.

Nice one and fascinating. While I was working on a tedious, repetitive task, I started looking into Python. I had a little experience with C#, but it just did not feel right, and Python was simple to adapt. I've never been regretting my Python journey since.

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and story John. In my case main python use in my life was also webscrapping from Amazon to find deals. I have improved a lot in my code and generally over time with lots of learning sources Would appreciate some content about automation of these python scripts please ? And may be dynamic content too (where one code runs other code, or passes data to other code at a dynamic time)

Came for the hope of automating parts of my work. Stayed for the CS talk!

Very good info, thanks!

Great tutorial, thanks!

Nice, video. I need to start looking into automating more things before I get automated.

When worlds collide lol nice to see a Prime nugget mentioned. Great video man!

The CS references really hit home for me. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 great video!

Love these quick and dirty scripts!

Same here 👏 In my case I had to copy-paste social media data into a clunky spreadsheet. I started with some simple Python scripts to automate whatever I could, ended up in love with programming and am currently building large-scale analytics apps for my company. Your channel has been huge help throughout the years! Thank you 🙏

Incredible! Would you consider keep making Playwright videos? I think there's a lot of demand for scraping AI web search (particularly Google Gemini responses).

Very good!

I'm just finishing up Automate the Boring Stuff now. I've been writing some programs for work as well. I'm a few months in and it's a lot of fun. So far i've automated a few work processes. The most meaningful one is reduce a potentially 30+ hour task to hitting run on a program, providing 3 user response, and a 2-5 minute wait.

Fantastic video

You changed my life. Only your videos. No joke.

Nice video as always. It would be cool to also see a video about solving captcha!

Been watching your videos for a while. Very informative and easy to understand for a newbie like me. Self taught programmer?

looks good / useful, but does this shopping cart software have a python API available, that would be easier to pull data from rather than resort to screen scraping.

Hi John, what do you use for such a smooth windows management?

What resource did you come across at 1:03? Apologies, the title and author all ran together.

Where / how does original orders - “for order in orders:” get populated before you populate via csv reader?

Thanks for your video. I'm following along and getting stuck at 8:52 with `page.get_by_role("button", name="Login").click()`. Has this happened for anyone else? Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this issue? Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

Does the system not have an export or an api? Would be much easier than hacking around the front end. If there was no export then i can see its use - or even running things in the UI - ive used test software to automate things for me before :) Its great seeing the computer do what you woudl be doing normally while you get on with something else more productive.

Can you do a video on how you decide what selectors you use in playwright - get_by_placeholder? get_by_role? query_selector? xpath?

I did the same thing but with Selenium for python, ultimately I wasn’t allowed to use it departmentally because selenium was not in the approved software for the company but it sure made my job a lot easier

Hey man thank you so much. So I would love to actually be able to automate stuff as you do without necessarily following tutorials ,could you share your thought process or perhaps make a video on how one can become good as you. I do understand Pythona and coding in general. I am interested in expanding my knowledge within automation scripts. Any pointers?

I'm a newbie data entry, I want to automate data processing and I need to start from the last page of the data and then export it to excel. Can I do that using this technique? thank you!

that is awesome. filed for ref.

How do you manage captcha ?

May I ask why you chose this method over the playwright codegen method you used in your past vid?

Nice . Is there any tutorial on Installtion of neovim and Installtion of python libraries please let me know

What colorscheme are you using? It's gorgeous.

Dude ngl i immediately click on your videos it has help me learning programs that help me with work thank you i appreciate your videos

Might be a silly question, but in this particular example you selected the particular "Orders", e.g. 3000, 3001, 3001. Now imagine it starts at 3000, however it keeps on going and you don't know when it stops. What would you write in the code?

As a person who doesn't understand much about coding: is having your username and password openly in a script the norm? It kinda... "feels" wrong... I assume you could make those two things an interactive prompt to type in everytime you start the program instead of having it written in the code permanently. But that won't help much if it is scheduled to run automatically at certain times without user interaction... Again, I don't understand much about programming, so I'm curious if that is a security concern in the "real world"?

Helix editor master race

Superb, wouldn't be even better if you start with "playwright codegen" and tune it afterwards?

Would you be available to meet on a call via Zoom at your hourly rate for a period of time you'd be available. I have a question regarding scraping Python API and I've watched all your videos that gave me an excellent overview I just have a few specific questions and would greatly appreciate your time helping me solve these couple of issues. Thank you!

I do some automations of some activities that are repetitive and boring. On my case I used a bash script.

Quick question, dose opencart allow for these scraping activities in their policy or they can band the IP, i know we are using playwrite with sleep time to mimic human but good to know if they anti-scrape bot or not

This is awesome but if you have access to APIs rather than UIs it's a lot more efficient to do it without any UI involved at all. Ideally software developers would be involved in helping eliminate so much busy work in the first place. I try to be helpful to other departments in that way where some small changes to a tool someone uses every day can make all the difference.

Subd 🤙🏻

All my scripts are in bash employing mostly awk, grep, sed, wc, find, expect, xargs, psql or sqlplus,

Really funny the company I work for uses the exact same angular admin theme. I think it’s called Color Admin. The only thing to note is that they might have an API that you can access that make your automation more stable by taking the UI out of it.

hello, I have watch several of your webscraping videos. those demo was straight foward. I dable a bit in python, nothing really to talk about on that. but could you just give a demo on: lets say I wanted to scrape a header and the associated images of that header. the headers by using some keyword from the website that has this as their headline : 'samsung new galaxy (some fancy name ) is a market hit says CEO. and the image have some text that is attatched to it that states: source getty images or somthing like that. to get those header and images returned. Can I just give all the header and image text as a keyword so beautiful soup could parse and ger the url for the image and assiciated header or header with assiciated image url then return the valueof the image and header. why I ask this?. because I don't want to be looking for those element manually (google inspect tool) I just need to add keywords and hit run then the code automatically find those and return them.

The video was pleasant, but the title didn't give any info on what the video was about.

why 20 minutes ?

if you do this, all the difficult part is about cloudflare

I did just this and now work remotely making six figures at the same company

Hey John, why you are never at your computer? Because scripts! Ok, here is more work then.

Yes its something great, and feels like you are so developed 😂😂, when you see someone do something that takes like hours while you can automate it, and let computer do it, while you are saving your energy and time to important things

Try it again with Puppeteer

1st like

6th 😂

Thanks this really gives a great outline to pull and analyze more efficiently. Exactly the type of thing I needed to see to get me back on the keys 🫡