They Asked for a Poster. I Automated the Problem Instead.
A laminated board and a marker would have worked. The more interesting question was why anyone needed to update the same information by hand in the first place.
They wanted a $200 laminated poster we could update with a marker.
Which is, technically, a system.
This is volunteer territory. Nobody signed up hoping to become the administrator of six disconnected systems. People have jobs, families and perfectly reasonable things to do with their evenings.
Which is usually the point where someone asks for a poster and I quietly think, hold my G&T.
The useful question was not whether I could automate it. It was why anyone needed to update the same number twice.
The data already existed
The transaction was already happening in Square. The display was already happening on digital signage. The manual job existed only because the two had never been connected.
So instead of building a prettier thing to update by hand, I built a live feed between the source and the display. As the underlying number changed, the public-facing version changed with it.
The point was not the automation
Automation is not automatically clever. Sometimes the marker really is the sensible answer.
The useful part is deciding which jobs should exist at all. If a person is repeatedly copying information that a system already knows, that is usually the place I start asking questions.
The reckoning
- Tool
- Square + GitHub + Netlify + OptiSigns
- Problem
- Turning live fundraiser donations into a scoreboard without someone manually updating a $200 laminated poster
- Difficulty
- ★★★★☆
- Biggest nuisance
- Authentication and making the live data reliable.
- Best discovery
- The same transaction data can become the campaign creative without another manual update.
- G&T required
- ★★★☆☆ — after work, obviously.
- Would I do it again?
- Absolutely. In fact, that is rather the point — the system is reusable.