Posted on

Problems that prevent routine white-collar tasks from being automated as a service

Recently I had a serial-entrepreneur acquaintance send me a form email for a new company he’d started with six others that aims to automate all routine tasks that white-collar workers have:

I have a quick question: When you hear the phrase: “Annoying business processes”, what comes to mind for you?

My company automates these processes. We can handle anything (anything!) that can be turned into a set of instructions. Even if the instructions contain complex logic — we’re totally custom. Even if the labor required would normally take hundreds of hours — it’s the same price.

I responded:

Continue reading “Problems that prevent routine white-collar tasks from being automated as a service”

Posted on

How to create a new Python project using PythonAnywhere, Bitbucket, SourceTree, and PyCharm

  1. I often find it difficult to start new projects on PythonAnywhere because setting them up properly requires a lot of steps.
    • (By “properly” I mean “using tools that will help you avoid headaches down the road”.)
  2. To help my future self get past that initial roadblock, I recently documented the steps involved when I start a new project.
  3. You can find it at the link below.
Posted on

Alcohol may reduce anxiety while programming

On Sunday I had my first-ever alcoholic drink on my own initiative, without being prompted by someone to drink (it was a Stella Artois in the fridge at work).

I decided to try it as an experiment to see if it would take away this anxious feeling I’ve been getting for years when I’m trying to program and I’m running into one error after another; the feeling ends up making me procrastinate really heavily, to the point where I’ll go an entire day without getting anything done.

I got the idea from reading Mark Zuckerberg’s blog posts from when he was creating Face Mash, in which he seems to describe drinking to take away the anxiety of not having your code working: “It’s taking a few tries to compile the script…another Beck’s is in order.“.

Well, it seemed to work. I’m not sure if it was just the placebo effect or not. I didn’t finish the beer. I’ll probably keep experimenting with it. Obviously it’s something to be careful with.