Case Summary

Back when I worked as a fraud monitoring offier at Scotiabank, I had a colleague that ran a car re-selling side-hustle during his free time. Once he saw that I built the knowledge center being used by people in the department. He asked me for help in automating part of his lead acquisition process.

Since I was just learning about software development, I thought it would be a nice challange to embark on. So I decided to help him for a small price equivalent to 67 dollars for the full project. I had never been paid before for developing something, so I was excited to be in business.

I developed a python script that used a Selenium client to get the online marketplace's page, apply the necessary filters, and automatically scrape relevant offer info, and seller contact details. This would then be written to a csv file that my colleague would later use to prioritize his sales calls throughout the day. The script was distributed to him as a windows .bat file that he could just double click from his computer's desktop.

Previously, manually scraping the offers would take him a couple hours. Thanks to the scraper, he only spends about 3-5 minutes before he is ready to start calling his leads.

My Take

This project allowed me to sell my first program. Though it was a small amount and it was just a single sale, it marks a shift in mindset to materialized the value of what software engineers, can do.