<story><title>Some tiny personal programs I&apos;ve written</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/08/tiny-programs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JamesMcMinn</author><text>I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote.&lt;p&gt;We had been looking for a new build for some time and had settled on a development and specific house we wanted to buy, but it was still months away from being released. We were told they released houses in person first, then listed them online later that day, but I was bored and wanted to see when new houses were listed, so I wrote a scraper to alert me whenever a new house became available.&lt;p&gt;One day, we got a call from the property developer telling us the house we were interested in would be available in person from 10am the next day. Because we wanted to be certain to get it, we appeared at 8am, only to find that 3 other people were already waiting. Houses are released in batches of 2 or 3, so whilst we weren&amp;#x27;t hopeful, we joined the queue and waited.&lt;p&gt;At 9am, while waiting in line, I got an alert telling me that the house had been released online, so I open their website on my phone and paid the deposit.&lt;p&gt;At 10am, when the sales office opened, all hell broke loose as the person first in line (waiting since 5am...) discovered the house they wanted had already been reserved online. I&amp;#x27;d effectively stolen his house. It was awkward to say the least as all of us were crammed into a tiny portacabin while this unfolded.&lt;p&gt;In truth, I felt awful for depriving him of the house he and his family wanted, but relieved that we had reserved the house we wanted after a 5 month wait. A few weeks later the developer got in touch to say that they had changed their policy nationwide and would only be releasing houses online in the future because of &amp;quot;the incident&amp;quot;...&lt;p&gt;Whilst I wasn&amp;#x27;t willing to give up our reservation, I worked with the person who had wanted our house so that they were alerted whenever a similar house in the same development became available. He got one, there&amp;#x27;s no hard feelings, and him and his family are now my next door neighbours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>japhyr</author><text>I appreciate you bringing this up, because I think this plays out all the time. I live in a small isolated town, and there wasn&amp;#x27;t a lot of turnover in houses even before the pandemic. I wrote a short script that scrapes all the listings, and alerts me to any new local listing. It was a fun little project to learn about generating text messages, and to see how effective a cron job on a sleeping MacBook can be. We ended up getting a house through a friend who sold their home without listing it, but those alerts were really helpful, and almost got us one house a little earlier.&lt;p&gt;The bigger story here is what this means for the divide between tech-literate people and the rest of the population. I don&amp;#x27;t think the parent commenter was wrong to write their script, and I don&amp;#x27;t think I was wrong to write mine, and if you wrote something similar I think it was a reasonable move as well. But we have to recognize the advantage this gives us, as people who are able to spot these opportunities and act on them.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t have any answers, but I think this story brings up a good discussion. I&amp;#x27;m curious to hear other people&amp;#x27;s thoughts on this.</text></comment>
<story><title>Some tiny personal programs I&apos;ve written</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/08/tiny-programs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JamesMcMinn</author><text>I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote.&lt;p&gt;We had been looking for a new build for some time and had settled on a development and specific house we wanted to buy, but it was still months away from being released. We were told they released houses in person first, then listed them online later that day, but I was bored and wanted to see when new houses were listed, so I wrote a scraper to alert me whenever a new house became available.&lt;p&gt;One day, we got a call from the property developer telling us the house we were interested in would be available in person from 10am the next day. Because we wanted to be certain to get it, we appeared at 8am, only to find that 3 other people were already waiting. Houses are released in batches of 2 or 3, so whilst we weren&amp;#x27;t hopeful, we joined the queue and waited.&lt;p&gt;At 9am, while waiting in line, I got an alert telling me that the house had been released online, so I open their website on my phone and paid the deposit.&lt;p&gt;At 10am, when the sales office opened, all hell broke loose as the person first in line (waiting since 5am...) discovered the house they wanted had already been reserved online. I&amp;#x27;d effectively stolen his house. It was awkward to say the least as all of us were crammed into a tiny portacabin while this unfolded.&lt;p&gt;In truth, I felt awful for depriving him of the house he and his family wanted, but relieved that we had reserved the house we wanted after a 5 month wait. A few weeks later the developer got in touch to say that they had changed their policy nationwide and would only be releasing houses online in the future because of &amp;quot;the incident&amp;quot;...&lt;p&gt;Whilst I wasn&amp;#x27;t willing to give up our reservation, I worked with the person who had wanted our house so that they were alerted whenever a similar house in the same development became available. He got one, there&amp;#x27;s no hard feelings, and him and his family are now my next door neighbours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gcheong</author><text>Great story though I initially thought you meant you wrote a script that paid off your house :).</text></comment>