On the Virtue of Laziness in Software Engineering

Many years ago, I recall reading in an O’Relly book which stated that when it comes to programming, “laziness” is considered a virtue.

Be lazy, like this cheetah!

That may seem like a strange thing to utter, but hear me out. When working in software engineering, you will find yourself doing the same thing over and over. It can be tedious and mind-numbing, and if it’s the sort of thing that involves multiple steps, can increase the risk of human error. For example, one case of human error cost a company millions of dollars and ultimately tanked that company.

This means that the more things that are automated or at least semi-automated, the better. There will be less manual steps to run, and less things that can go wrong because a step was missed or not executed properly. Conversely, because automation means the same thing is done over and over, you’ll get repeatable builds which make things like troubleshooting, multi-tenancy, and disaster recovery easier to perform.

Continue reading “On the Virtue of Laziness in Software Engineering”

Splunking Yelp Reviews

Awhile ago, I found myself trying to make a decision on which of several restaurants to eat at. They were all highly rated in Yelp, but surely there might be more insights I could pull from their reviews. So I decided to Splunk them!

TL;DR If you want to get straight to the code, go to https://github.com/dmuth/splunk-yelp-reviewsto get started.

Downloading the reviews

“Splunk: See your world. Maybe wish you hadn’t.”

Yelp has an API but, I am sorry to say that it is awful. It will only let you download 3 reviews for any venue. That’s it! What a crime.

So… I had to crawl Yelp venue pages to get reviews. I am not proud of this, but I was left with no other other option.

Python has been my go-to language lately, so I decided to solve the problem of review acquisition with Python. I used the Requests module to fetch the HTML code, and the Beautiful Soup module to extract reviews and page links from the HTML.

Continue reading “Splunking Yelp Reviews”