Case study
Daily booking bot
A bot that wins a daily booking slot which opens at six in the morning and is gone within minutes, run unattended every day for a client who could not be awake for it.
Overview
A community centre released its booking slots at six every morning, and they were taken within minutes. The client wanted a place each day and could not reliably be awake, at a keyboard and fast enough to get one.
The bot selects the options, fills in the details and submits, every morning, without anyone present.
What I own
The whole tool, across two contracts. The client returned for a second engagement, and later for unrelated work.
Complexities tackled
A deadline you cannot retry. Most automation can be rerun if it fails. This cannot: miss the window and the slot is gone until tomorrow. That changes what the code has to do. It has to be running and warmed up before the release rather than starting at it, and it has to complete the whole sequence rather than fail halfway through with the form half filled.
Being early is as bad as being late. Submitting before the slots open fails just as surely as submitting after they are taken. The timing has to be tight to a window measured in seconds, on a machine whose clock is not the site’s.
Stack
Python with Selenium, run on a schedule.
Working on something similar?
Tell me what you are building and what is in the way. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.