Going From 10 to 100, The Hard Way
So, I had this little script. Really basic stuff. It just pulled some numbers from a few places online, crunched them a bit, and spat out a simple list. Honestly, it was just for me, saved me like 10 minutes each morning. Handled maybe 10 items, max. If I tried more, it choked.
Then a buddy saw it. He wanted to use it. Then another guy. Suddenly, my little 10-item toy wasn’t cutting it. People were asking, “Can it do 50? Can it do 100?” I figured, why not? Seemed simple enough at first.
That’s where the real work started.
First thing, I had to actually look at the code again. It was messy. Stuff I’d slapped together months ago. Had to clean that up. Spent a whole Saturday just making it readable.
Then, tackling the “10 item” limit. The way I was pulling the data was dumb. One item at a time. Super slow. If I wanted 100 items, that would take forever. So I had to figure out how to grab things more efficiently. Didn’t use any fancy libraries, just read some docs on the websites I was pulling from, found ways to ask for more data at once. Took a lot of trial and error. Lots of errors, actually.
Next up, the processing part. My old laptop started wheezing when I tried feeding it 50 items. Okay, time to optimize. Found some bottlenecks, places where the script was doing stupid loops or holding too much stuff in memory. Again, no magic solutions. Just broke the problem down:
- Read data faster.
- Process data smarter, piece by piece maybe.
- Don’t keep what you don’t need.
It was slow going. Every time I fixed one thing, something else would break. Or it would work, but be incredibly slow. Had one week where the whole thing just stopped working because one of the websites changed its layout. Had to rewrite a whole section just for that. Almost gave up then. Felt like patching holes in a sinking boat.
But I kept plugging away. Evenings, weekends. Little changes. Testing. More changes. Finally got it handling 50 items reliably. Then pushed it to 70. Then 100. It wasn’t fast, but it worked.
Looking back, getting from 10 to 100 wasn’t about some genius move.
It was just grunt work. Fixing the obvious stupid stuff first. Then finding the next slowest part and making it slightly less slow. Repeat. Didn’t need fancy tools or complex algorithms. Just needed patience and the willingness to fix the next broken thing.
Now it handles 100 items easy. Sometimes I push it even more. It’s still just a simple script, really. But it does the job. And yeah, seeing it handle 100 things when it used to struggle with 10? Feels pretty good. It’s not rocket science, just good old-fashioned persistence.
