My Little Adventure with ‘magdaniel’
Okay, so let me tell you about this thing I ended up calling ‘magdaniel’. It wasn’t some big, official project, more like a personal itch I had to scratch. Every single morning, I had this mind-numbing task. Downloading a bunch of files from our old reporting system, and then, the real fun part: sorting them into different folders and renaming them based on some weird convention. Took me a good half hour, sometimes more if I wasn’t focused. Coffee hadn’t even kicked in yet, you know? Just pure drag.
First, I thought, maybe I can use some standard Windows batch commands. I poked around a bit, tried writing a simple script. But man, it felt like pulling teeth. Handling the filenames, especially with the weird dates and codes embedded in them, was just messy. Got tangled up pretty quickly and it felt super fragile. One small change in the filename pattern, and the whole thing would probably break.
So, I scrapped that idea. Remembered I’d dabbled a bit with Python a while back. Thought, maybe that’s the way? Seemed more powerful for string stuff. So, I fired up my editor one Friday evening. Started pulling together pieces. Found some libraries for grabbing files and moving them around – that part was okay. The real headache was figuring out how to reliably pull the date, the client code, and the report type from those crazy filenames.
The weekend grind…
Spent most of Saturday just trying different ways to slice and dice those strings. Hit a snag with some inconsistent formatting. Some files had underscores, others had dashes, dates were sometimes MM-DD-YY, sometimes DD-MM-YYYY. Classic legacy system stuff, right? Almost threw my hands up. Seriously considered just going back to doing it manually. But then, late Saturday night, messing around with some regular expressions – which I barely understood, honestly, just copy-pasting and tweaking like crazy – I finally got something that seemed to work on my test files. Felt like magic, hence the ‘mag’ part of the name, maybe? Daniel’s my name, so, ‘magdaniel’ it became. No fancy logic behind it.
Sunday was about tidying up. Made it read files from one specific ‘download’ folder and spit them out into nicely named subfolders. Added a tiny bit of logging, just printing to the screen what it was doing, so I knew it wasn’t just stuck. Tested it with a bigger batch of old files. It wasn’t lightning fast, and the code was probably ugly as sin to a real programmer, but it did the job.
What Came Out of It
So, Monday morning came. Instead of dreading the file sorting, I just ran my little ‘magdaniel’ script. Double-clicked the .py file (after figuring out how to make that work easily). Watched the text scroll by. And bam! Done. Files sorted, renamed, everything in its place. In like, 15 seconds instead of 30 minutes.
- Saved time: Obvious win. Got back nearly 30 minutes every morning.
- Reduced errors: No more dragging the wrong file or messing up a rename because I was half asleep.
- Learned stuff: Forced myself to actually use Python for something practical, even if it was basic.
Look, ‘magdaniel’ wasn’t revolutionary. It had no interface, barely any error handling beyond stopping if something went really wrong. But it solved my problem, right there and then. Sometimes, that’s all that matters. You just build the tool you need, even if it’s held together with digital duct tape. It’s still running today, saving me those precious morning minutes. Good enough for me.
