
Ask HN: Software gigs involving small, scripting-type tasks? - normac
I love writing small, elegant programs--under 500 lines, say--that do one thing well. Scrape a website and dump the data to a CSV; take a directory full of video files and rename them based on the metadata; poll a JSON API for a retail site to check the price of an item and email someone if it decreases.<p>I like coding, but it isn&#x27;t my passion, so it&#x27;s hard to get my teeth into developing a big web app, or making small enhancements and bugfixes on someone else&#x27;s. But I always love those little projects when I get the chance to do one. There are lots of non-programming fields that involve this kind of thing (data science, devops, IT, etc.). But are there fields or sub-industries of the software world wherein it&#x27;s possible to do this kind of old-school scripting for a living?
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steve1011
You could find applications in almost any field, given that there is work done
on a computer or have access to one regularly. As for it being a big portion
of daily work, I'd guess that most would be technically oriented, similar to
those you listed (data science, dev ops, IT)

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04rob
Not sure why you want to so quickly discount data science, dev ops, etc. But
you could also consider many research areas in computer science that use light
scripting to prove out new algorithms and techniques. Another area is computer
security/pen testing.

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senjindarashiva
Most of my daily work involves the type of scripting you mention, granted we
do have some bigger projects as well but we spend most of our time making
small scripts. I work for a small "analysis house" (finance sector)

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curiousjorge
do you do a lot of web scraping? what sort of scripts are these designed to
do?

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byoung2
[https://www.fiverr.com/categories/programming-
tech](https://www.fiverr.com/categories/programming-tech) sounds like it might
be a possibility.

