build log · 2026 · 4 min

Automating the boring parts on purpose

a script doesn't complain about doing the same thing every Monday.

EEvery week, someone at MyRain Sprinkler Systems opened a supplier price list, compared it line by line against what was live on the store, and updated a few hundred SKUs by hand. It worked. It also ate an afternoon that could've gone to literally anything else.

So I wrote a script that does the boring part instead: downloads the supplier's price list, parses about a thousand SKUs with openpyxl, diffs them against the live Shopify catalog, and pushes the changes through Shopify's GraphQL API. It runs on a schedule via GitHub Actions and doesn't need me to be awake for any of it.↑ 'it works' is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence

The best automation isn't clever. It's just the thing you'd do by hand, minus the part where it's you.

The part I underestimated was the audit log. Nobody asks for it until the one week a price looks wrong, and then everyone wants to know exactly what changed and why. Now every run writes a report (what updated, what didn't, what errored), so the answer is a file, not a memory.

$0 monthly hosting, about 1,000 SKUs updated per run, and no more spreadsheet comparisons eating my Mondays. I'm aware this makes me sound like I'm selling something. I'm not. I just really don't want to do that by hand again.zero afternoons lost to this since. i checked.