this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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One time at work I was tasked with writing a python script to compare two data sources. Like, you give it two CSVs and a primary key, and it tells you what data is in one but not the other, or mismatched, and so on. This worked fine and was in git, so anyone can use it.
My boss then asks if I can "put it on a website so anyone can use it".
This team has never done web development. Nothing for that is set up. Like, I could spin up a quick Django app or similar, but there's a lot of stuff to do and potentially fuck up.
I said "that sounds like a lot of research and ongoing maintenance costs. I think it'd be better to just check out and run the script"
Luckily for me he said "oh, okay"
not hot dog
Funnily enough this comic hasn't been true for a long time because of ML.
Well they did say it would be possible in 5 years ...
I had a boss who read an article about APIs and then came to me and ordered me to start using them. I said I would research it and he went away and never mentioned it again. This was in 2010.
Pretty sure he read the famous Bezos email ordering everyone to implement and use APIs in Amazon
My past managers would have said "I don't understand why it is so difficult, and I'm not open to learn"
Good guy manager trusts the person he pays to know this stuff to know this stuff.
This is a good point. He's not a bad guy. He's just not very technical, and sometimes that's frustrating.
How big were the CSVs? That sounds like a standard thing most spreadsheet apps can do already, unless the data size made traditional apps unusable.
I have an easier time doing that shit in powershell than I do in Excel which are the only tools I have available at work. I'm probably doing something wrong but I don't do it often enough to remember what that is. My PS script just works.
The biggest ones I've seen are 1.2GB.
Why this company uses gigabyte CSVs is a separate problem.
(Also sometimes they want to compare a CSV to what's in a database, which the script can also do but I didn't mention in the post)
That makes sense. I have been asked to write a program that does a standard spreadsheet function on multiple occasions, so I was just curious. Sometimes people just don't know the tools at hand, want to offload their work, or think an over complicated workflow is a better workflow. I can see how it was actually useful in your case though.