> I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth...
FWIW, Conde has no input on my work. Conde is the machine that provides HR and legal and payroll. Ars is a more or less self-contained world and since I got kicked into management a few years back, my output is my own. I wrote this up because this is how the project unfolded; no one assigned it to me or said I needed to write a July story to make a quota. It was fun. I did the write-up because it felt like an Ars-y thing to write up.
Definitely heard re: wanting to stumble through things and see the warts, but I have to disagree on the "learning enough python to make this work would still have been a weekend project." That's simply not true—if it were, I would have done it.
But it's not like the project didn't require effort. I put in considerable time on the parts that weren't python coding and CAD. Planning out and setting up the systemd service and timers, packaging up the service to ensure the thing was running under a properly isolated service account context, writing the installer, setting up the deployment pipeline—I didn't want to do the usual lazy thing I see so often and just take a barely functional mess of conflicting dependencies and shove them into a docker container and say "Here, this works on my computer, your problem now."
But like I said elsewhere in the thread, at 48 I'm old enough and ossified enough that I've come to accept that coding is simply not a skill I've got in me, and cranking out even something relatively simple like this project is going to be impossible for me without help. I've tried, too—I've bootstrapped myself through code academies, tried DIY courses, thrown myself into code-adjacent weekend projects, and otherwise tried to get to some level of mastery past "hello world," and I just kinda....suck. I bounced off of coding 30 years ago in college, I've bounced off it professionally for anything more than simple bash scripting, and I've bounced off of it in hobbies. I don't know if it's that my english major brain just doesn't do well in chopping problems down into small enough chunks or what—but I know after a lifetime that it's something I'm never going to be able to do.
That and bowling. Never scored over 100 in a game in my life, and likely at this point never will. Some things are just beyond my reach.