Slightly off topic, but I need to vent: most services are still being built web first, without any kind of API.
From January 1st to send international small packets "it has become obligatory to transmit data, such as the sender's name and address and names of the contents, to the destination postal service in advance converted into an electronic format called Electronic Advance Data (EAD)." By and in itself this is a good thing.
So the Japanese post (JP Post) has put up a website to do this: problem, there is no API... Everything has to be done by clicking and confirming. It's not even possible to register shipments in bulk, they have to be done one by one. About 10 actions per customer per shipment.
I run a (very) small tea business [1], similar to and inspired by Bemmu's Candy Japan [2] after I met him at a Hacker News meetup in Osaka. It's tiny, 100 to 150 shipments per month, but registering a hundred shipments by hand is not something I want to do. One unsatisfactory answer is of course to reach for good old Selenium. And it works, but I hope JP Post will not update its website too often... (unless it is to add an API, of course).
We have a similar issue at work, where some official, business-essential data that changes each week is only available via a JavaScript-driven web page.
My coworker used Selenium to write an extractor to get the data automatically, so one of us doesn't have to sit each weekend and do it manually.
When I built beatsaver[1] for the modding community of beatsaber, I pretty much started with the data layout first, then the API for it. Ensuring everyone else would have access to the database as a source of truth to be built on. Its still around and has shaped the modding community early on to be as open as it can with API doing their one thing, and their one thing really well.
From January 1st to send international small packets "it has become obligatory to transmit data, such as the sender's name and address and names of the contents, to the destination postal service in advance converted into an electronic format called Electronic Advance Data (EAD)." By and in itself this is a good thing.
So the Japanese post (JP Post) has put up a website to do this: problem, there is no API... Everything has to be done by clicking and confirming. It's not even possible to register shipments in bulk, they have to be done one by one. About 10 actions per customer per shipment.
I run a (very) small tea business [1], similar to and inspired by Bemmu's Candy Japan [2] after I met him at a Hacker News meetup in Osaka. It's tiny, 100 to 150 shipments per month, but registering a hundred shipments by hand is not something I want to do. One unsatisfactory answer is of course to reach for good old Selenium. And it works, but I hope JP Post will not update its website too often... (unless it is to add an API, of course).
[1] https://tomotcha.com
[2] https://www.candyjapan.com