Scripting Windows Apps

An internal Amazon post that wandered onto the public archive with "(confidential info deleted)" still stamped mid-script: Steve is writing for coworkers, ribbing them about the intranet login wall and telling them which in-house mailing list to join for Ruby talk. The central trick has outlived every tool it names. Rather than fight the auth system, he drives a browser that is already signed in and lifts the rendered page straight out of its DOM — the same move every modern browser-automation framework makes, arrived at here for the homely reason that his IE session was already logged in from that morning. The post also works as a skirmish in his 2004 campaign to convert Amazon's Perl holdouts to Ruby, complete with a sigh over Perl's mandatory trailing 1; and a postscript plugging a small "web testing with Ruby" project that grew up to become Watir.

Neither of the longer scripts survived the trip to Google Sites intact — line breaks got chewed and statements fused together, so they read fine as a technique and will not run as pasted. This is among the slightest entries in the Drunken run, a friendly workplace how-to whose Ruby-versus-Perl-versus-Python scorekeeping is strictly period material, and Steve's promised follow-up post on the topic never appeared. What's left to enjoy is the mood: a programmer who has just found a cheap trick he knows will pay rent for years, writing it down while the grin is still on.