Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.
Excellent story! Discussion on HN is indeed second to none.
Would you brother mind sharing what kind of tasks he would like to script? I am a big fan of Python and it is always interesting to see how people use it in various industries.
Sure. Since Ellis Don is a huge company they often end up doing join partnerships with other huge companies because large projects often need companies with multiple deep fields of expertise. This results in needing to use both companies systems to track things like concrete truck tickets, personnel on site, meeting minutes, etc.
Usually the tools that are built for very large construction companies use fairly open file formats, like xml, or CSV files. Instead of having to double enter the data, he'd like to be able to enter in the information once, then have it propagate to the other system. This would free up about 5 hours a week for him on his current project that is expected to take about 3 years. So the total time saved would be about 750 hours, minus the time it took him to program the system.
That would be the most complex case. Others include needing to rename hundreds of thousands of site photos, or to include in an email only photos that matched a certain pattern (for example: duff-site_2011-09-14_4201.jpg would match a pattern looking for all the photos on the duff site taken in September but only between floors 40 and 45).
Other programs he would like would be to import into their in house tracking system any invoices his subtrades email him, again, matching a certain pattern (dig-con_final-invoice_duff-site_req-345.pdf).
Comments
Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.
Excellent story! Discussion on HN is indeed second to none.
Would you brother mind sharing what kind of tasks he would like to script? I am a big fan of Python and it is always interesting to see how people use it in various industries.
He doesn't have an HN account, but I've answered the question here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287400
Can you/he give examples for task he can automate with a program?
Sure. Since Ellis Don is a huge company they often end up doing join partnerships with other huge companies because large projects often need companies with multiple deep fields of expertise. This results in needing to use both companies systems to track things like concrete truck tickets, personnel on site, meeting minutes, etc.
Usually the tools that are built for very large construction companies use fairly open file formats, like xml, or CSV files. Instead of having to double enter the data, he'd like to be able to enter in the information once, then have it propagate to the other system. This would free up about 5 hours a week for him on his current project that is expected to take about 3 years. So the total time saved would be about 750 hours, minus the time it took him to program the system.
That would be the most complex case. Others include needing to rename hundreds of thousands of site photos, or to include in an email only photos that matched a certain pattern (for example: duff-site_2011-09-14_4201.jpg would match a pattern looking for all the photos on the duff site taken in September but only between floors 40 and 45).
Other programs he would like would be to import into their in house tracking system any invoices his subtrades email him, again, matching a certain pattern (dig-con_final-invoice_duff-site_req-345.pdf).