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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2001 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 31, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I live in an apartment building that offers free visitor parking with online registration. The web form asks a lot, between the info of visitor and the resident to every detail of the car. It's not unreasonable, but it's time consuming, and there isn't a way to easily re-register a car that's previously been registered.

How feasible is it to create a local app on my Android phone that automates all this?

I did some light coding years back so am not completely code illiterate, but expect will have to heavily rely on GPT 4 / Claude 3 and general smarts to make this work. I feel like the personal breakeven for me is making this work in 8 hours or less. To be honest, I doubt this app will save me more than 4 hours over the lifetime of my staying in this apartment, though the personal satisfaction of beating an inefficient system is worth like 4 hours.

It seems to me like the basic components are:

  • Install Android IDE
  • Tailor an HTTP request to the web form: replicate form submissions, which is pretty basic--visit the URL, enter the static building passcode, choose permit type from a dropdown, then enter text fields, then click submit
  • Create a Google spreadsheet with all the requisite info of my guests and their vehicles to serve as the database. Seems easier to just make the file visible to all with the URL, though I understand it'd be more secure to invest in figuring out their API with OAuth etc.
  • Create a simple app GUI to tap on a name to auto submit the HTTP request to the webpage
  • Create error handling to confirm form returns success

There are probably a dozen QOL features that I could add, like displaying the registration date and time, add/edit guest info directly in app, offline support etc. But I'm just interested in the simple basics right now.

What do you think about this approach? It feels like this is a bigger project than 8 hours (for me). Are there places to cut corners so I can more readily rely on GPT4 to do the heavy lifting?

Separately, I'm curious how long end-to-end you think an actually competent developer might need to create something basic like this. Because if it's like 2 hours with the aid of GPT4, I might try to see if I can pay a friend to do this for me...

Check out Selenium, maybe just use python/selenium for the form automation and run it from your computer. You could have a table of your guest personas and just read that into the script. I've never done web dev stuff but I'd think finagling the script into an API that you could call to from some simple web gui would be doable on a cheap VPS.

Good call. I did code a little scraper in Selenium a long time ago.

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