When [Zeke Gabrielse] needed to book a flight, the Internet hive-mind recommended that he look into traveling with Southwest airlines due to a drop in fares late Thursday nights. Not one to stay up all night refreshing the web page indefinitely, he opted to write a script to take care of the tedium for him.
Settling on Node.js as his web scraper of choice, numerous avenues of getting the flight pricing failed before he finally had to cobble together a script that would fill out and submit the search form for him. With the numbers coming in, [Grabrielse] set up a Twilio account to text him once fares dropped below a certain price point — because, again, why not automate?
[Gabrielse]’s patience paid off and he managed to snag tickets for thirty-six freaking dollars apiece. Saving money and learning a few tricks — what’s not to love? Of course, he was also generous enough to provide a GitHub link to his code and some instructions to boot.
Next step, automating your Android games.
[via /r/programming]
Filed under: software hacks
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