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  • Corporate kludge

    So, I started a summer job last Thursday. On paper, it sounds tech-y, but in practice it's basically data entry: I

    1. Look up a product's vendor number on our site,
    2. manually query the vendor for specs on it,
    3. copy and paste the query results, with excessive formatting, to our site, and
    4. type (not copy) various keywords from the specs into a form so our site's internal search engine can find the product.

    I then repeat . . . two hundred and fifty times, so far, over the past two days. Obviously, this job kinda sucks. I was told in advance that it sucks, and I'm overqualified, but I took it anyway because it means more cash and a chance to put something tech-related on my resume. Mind you, the company in general is not poorly run; they seem to be growing very quickly, and moving a ton of product. But up until now, the boss (it's a small company) was forced by default to be the tech guy, and as you might guess, he's not very intuitive with this stuff. But now, I'm wondering, "can I make this into an opportunity to help the company, and convert my crap job into something that will give me extra practice at a meaningful skill?"

    Specifically, I'm thinking, would it be possible to get a dump of the vendor's database at anything like a reasonable price, and set up a cgi server on our end to automate my job? Is that the kind of thing that's "done"? The trick is that, at present, I know jack **** about php/perl/whatever. Is this something I could learn quickly, then jury-rig a free cgi engine to do the work for me? Ideally, we'd just about gut the existing company website; our product information contains considerable errors (I've been writing them down as I go, three full pages so far), and the site is cluttered as hell (I'm making it even more so). But I know that's beyond my level at this point. It's a small enough company that I might be able to leverage my position into a better job by the end of the summer.

    Alternatively, I can keep my head down, do the stupid work, and move on. I passed my second Cisco test last Monday.
    1011 1100
    Pyrebound--a free online serial fantasy novel

  • #2
    When you say, "manually query the vendor" ... do you mean search on their website? If so then you could probably automate it. This is basically what I do on some of my gaming websites, scripts that pull data off the game servers.

    With the details of the website/query/data and I can give you a more definitive answer.

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    • #3
      Congratulations on passing your test, Elok!
      If there is no sound in space, how come you can hear the lasers?
      ){ :|:& };:

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      • #4
        To us, it is the BEAST.

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        • #5
          If you've got a dump of the vendor's database then it would probably take a couple hours to automate your job with any reasonable programming language

          If you can't get a dump of the vendor's database then you can probably still automate it depending on how the vendor's website is queried, e.g. if it's a REST api (so you query it by going to http://www.VendorWebsite.com/product/roductId) then you can get a website dump using a free tool like http://www.httrack.com/ and then write a rinky-dink parser to parse the results (even the world's most naive parser is going run faster and more reliably than manual data entry)
          Last edited by loinburger; June 29, 2014, 13:23.
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          • #6
            Another 'test' is to say "I think that is possible" and do it.

            JM
            Jon Miller-
            I AM.CANADIAN
            GENERATION 35: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social experiment.

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            • #7
              For parsing the results, strip off formatting characters from the input and then use something like the Aho–Corasick algorithm to match the keywords you're interested in (you can probably find an implementation in whatever programming language you're using)

              If the vendor is popular enough then somebody might have already written an automated site query program and posted it to Sourceforge or wherever
              Last edited by loinburger; June 29, 2014, 14:08.
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              • #8
                What made you go the Cisco route? Are you trying to be a network engineer?

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Aeson View Post
                  When you say, "manually query the vendor" ... do you mean search on their website? If so then you could probably automate it. This is basically what I do on some of my gaming websites, scripts that pull data off the game servers.

                  With the details of the website/query/data and I can give you a more definitive answer.
                  I mean search their website; I was trying to be concise for a change, and "manually query" was my clumsy best effort. It's a process the boss and I worked out the morning of my first day on the job. I do a reverse lookup by vendor number; that gets me a fairly ugly table of results, but with the vendor's inventory numbers on--and we don't want that on our website. So I copy the whole thing to MS Word (yes, really), delete the first column, and copy it again into the wysiwyg editor program that manages our website, which isn't up to column-deleting niceties. The whole process somehow generates the least efficient html possible--every single cell has multiple style values explicitly defined on the spot, plus, for some reason, the whole thing is preceded by about a dozen tags setting the font to TNR, then unsetting it without any content inside. Probably some other stuff too. The end product clashes horribly with the web page, and about 95% of what I copy is trash code taking up server space, but the goal here is getting the information to the webpage without requiring any esoteric knowledge. There's not much programming know-how on the Eastern Shore. So . . . yeah. Sixteen hours in, I've done about 250, with more than a thousand left to go. I'd have done three times that, at least, but manually cramming all the search terms into the form afterwards is time-consuming and sometimes takes a little thought and economy, since there's a character limit.

                  I know the boss doesn't like the website, or the editor that makes it, or much of anything else about his company's e-presence. The whole thing is held together with duct tape and hope AFAICT. If only I knew enough to really fix it.
                  1011 1100
                  Pyrebound--a free online serial fantasy novel

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                  • #10
                    Oh, and thanks, HC and Sava. Drixnak, I went the Cisco route because it could be learned relatively quickly and seemed like it was in demand. The annoying thing is, everybody wants a CCNA AND a security clearance AND two or three other certs AND three years industry experience, when they don't want a BS in compsci. And they never want it anywhere on my side of the bridge, that's for sure. I'm just gathering as many skills as I can now, looking for a way forward. It doesn't help that I'm not good at "selling myself," as they say.
                    1011 1100
                    Pyrebound--a free online serial fantasy novel

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                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Elok View Post
                      Oh, and thanks, HC and Sava.
                      np, you did all the work
                      To us, it is the BEAST.

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Elok View Post
                        I mean search their website; I was trying to be concise for a change, and "manually query" was my clumsy best effort. It's a process the boss and I worked out the morning of my first day on the job. I do a reverse lookup by vendor number; that gets me a fairly ugly table of results, but with the vendor's inventory numbers on--and we don't want that on our website. So I copy the whole thing to MS Word (yes, really), delete the first column, and copy it again into the wysiwyg editor program that manages our website, which isn't up to column-deleting niceties. The whole process somehow generates the least efficient html possible--every single cell has multiple style values explicitly defined on the spot, plus, for some reason, the whole thing is preceded by about a dozen tags setting the font to TNR, then unsetting it without any content inside. Probably some other stuff too. The end product clashes horribly with the web page, and about 95% of what I copy is trash code taking up server space, but the goal here is getting the information to the webpage without requiring any esoteric knowledge. There's not much programming know-how on the Eastern Shore. So . . . yeah. Sixteen hours in, I've done about 250, with more than a thousand left to go. I'd have done three times that, at least, but manually cramming all the search terms into the form afterwards is time-consuming and sometimes takes a little thought and economy, since there's a character limit.

                        I know the boss doesn't like the website, or the editor that makes it, or much of anything else about his company's e-presence. The whole thing is held together with duct tape and hope AFAICT. If only I knew enough to really fix it.
                        Generally speaking, info you can get copying text from a website you can get with a script. Parsing plain HTML is easy as long as they have a standard (between their products) formatting for the product info.

                        If 16 hours in you've gotten 1/5th of the work done, there's not a lot of time to be saved though given you'd have to learn what you're doing. You'd probably end up sinking more time into it than just doing the work. (You'd save someone down the line a lot of time though ... ) Still it would be something useful to learn.

                        Does your website run on PHP? What editor do you use?

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                        • #13
                          It's not a fifth, more like an eighth. I wasn't thinking of any one particular solution, honestly. Ideally the whole thing would be uprooted and replaced, like I said, but that's probably not in the cards. We use Volusion to maintain the site, it's pretty idiot-proof but sometimes acts goofy. I'm mainly thinking that his solution isn't really scaleable; his business is still growing, and all I'm doing is adding another layer of patchwork to his existing messy quilt.
                          1011 1100
                          Pyrebound--a free online serial fantasy novel

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            I never used Volusion. Signed up for a free trial and took a couple looks at it and didn't want anything to do with it.

                            Volusion won't let you run custom scripts I don't think. You can however import/export inventory. You could write a script that runs on a separate host (or local machine) and outputs the formatted data in a way that's easy to cut and paste, then import to Volusion. But you'd need access to the import/export functionality, and I would suspect the boss wouldn't give you access to it to "learn" on.

                            You could still automate any formatting of the text on a separate host to input into the editor.

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by Elok View Post
                              Oh, and thanks, HC and Sava. Drixnak, I went the Cisco route because it could be learned relatively quickly and seemed like it was in demand. The annoying thing is, everybody wants a CCNA AND a security clearance AND two or three other certs AND three years industry experience, when they don't want a BS in compsci. And they never want it anywhere on my side of the bridge, that's for sure. I'm just gathering as many skills as I can now, looking for a way forward. It doesn't help that I'm not good at "selling myself," as they say.
                              Were you around back in 2010 when I tried to go this same route for the same reasons? There are very few jobs for networking engineering to begin with. Think about it. A business has to have a need for the kind of infrastructure that would warrant a full time network engineer. The vast majority of businesses simply aren't big enough to ever need that. Then as you just found out, you need a security clearance for a lot of the jobs. I gave up on that route when Lockheed Martin said they were interested in me and then said I had to have a security clearance. Only real way to break into it is to start off as a low level tech in some large corporation and work your way up. Getting a security clearance or somehow walking into a position at a corporation from the start is a pipe dream.

                              Your other route is to become a sys admin working on windows server and AD or something. That pays a lot less, but even small to mid size companies have tech guys that do that stuff so there are more jobs available. The same issues are there though in that you'll probably have to start off as a low level tech. Go on forums and stuff you'll see all kinds of posts of how people work their way up doing phone tech support. It's low pay, the work sucks, and it can take a while to work your way up.

                              Your true salvation lies in software development. If you have the aptitude for it the sky is the limit. The amount of things you can do with it are endless and it lends itself very well to work beyond the day job and in entrepreneurial endeavors. Don't listen to any bull**** someone tells you about needing a comp sci degree. You don't need it. It's largely useless and the only people who swear by them are the people who spent the time and money to get one and feel it was an accomplishment. At the end of the day, no one gives a damn about certifications or your degree. I also have the CCNA and the CCNA Security along with all kinds of CompTIA certifications. They all ended up useless and I haven't bothered to get a single software dev cert. What you really need is a technical degree and I recommend the software development one from Western Governor's University.

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