Over the last weeks I started tinkering around with a script to solve a real life problem.
We do some sports in the family, which needs registration every week to participate.
The current mode for registration is a fixed date and time at which the registration starts for everyone.
Slots are limited to a fairly small amount in comparison to the people wanting to join.
Long story short. You really have to be on time to get a spot.
After being on the waiting list once again, I decided to find a technical solution to this problem.
Fortunately, I was lucky and found an existing description for the REST-API used by the service.
Not comprehensive, but good enough to have a starting point.
So, over the past weekends I developed a script that is checking if
an activity is available and trying to register for attendance.
After another spot on the waiting list due to wrong assumptions in my script, I finally had a semi automated solution.
But this solution only reduced the time to register, but didn’t solve the need to be on the computer for registration.
So, I created a CRON-job on my home-server starting my script one minute before registration.
And as finishing touch adding notifications about the process via a
Home Assistant Webhook.
It ensures I get a Push-Notification
on my smartphone to have peace of mind that everything worked out.
And today was the day - it finally worked fully automatically for the first time.
It is such a rewarding feeling to have solved a real life problem with your own technical skills.
Disclaimer: To keep things private, I am purposefully vague about the service that is used here. This story is more about describing my motivation and feelings and not really technical aspects of the solution.