Hello Savers!
Coupon Admin started as a dream while standing in a checkout line at Kroger. I was feverishly trying to scroll and clip coupons before the next self-checkout opened up. Then it hit me. Why can’t I create a Python script to clip these digital coupons for me. That night I Googled and found a few GitHub posts from users offering some python examples (post 1 & post 2). Those scripts work but are to technical for the everyday shopper. After finding it was not an original idea, I placed it towards the middle of my long list of ideas. It wasn’t until a month or two later while listening to a podcast about Closet Tools that I got the idea to attempt to create a simple Chrome extension to clip coupons. Using GitHub Copilot in VS Code I was able to prompt it to set up the extension and build out a script to clip the coupons on Kroger before my kids woke for the day.
I am not a software developer by any means. My background is in finance and accounting. I great with Excel formulas and can automate a lot of my work with simple VBA’s and creating reusable templates to get my work done. Early on with Excel I had the mindset “there is probably a better way” and if a task was taking longer then I thought it should, then I would spend five to ten minutes to Google a solution. From those short Google exercises my knowledge of Excel expanded. Recently in the last two years have reached the peak of what I want to do in Excel and have started to look elsewhere for automation. This lead me done the vast rabbit hole of coding.
The first “coding” project I completed was BUILDR. BUILDR is an Excel based cycling workout editor for Wahoo Cycling computers. I built it because I wanted to create custom heartrate based workouts. All the options available either were behind a paywall or did not have heartrate.
BUILDR is an Excel based cycling workout editor for Wahoo Cycling computers.
More to come….