Lazy News / Twitter Bot
Instant music startup news for those too lazy to browse
Year: 2014-5
Doing a startup is difficult, not least because everyone is just so digitally wired, tweeting and reposting industry related ‘intelligence’ all day long, that if you turn up at a meeting ignorant of some piece of news that was released two hours ago, you feel like an idiot.
What with being at least a decade older than everyone else at Wayra, plus being married with a child, I needed another solution if I was to avoid looking daft more often than is reasonable to people who know me.
And so Lazy News was born. I took a short course in Ruby on Rails at the great tech school Steer, and set about building a scraper, which is pretty much standard for a first backend programming project.
I went to the music and digital technology sources I usually read, and set up an automatic retrieval of new stories as they happen, which are then collected on the site, and emailed to me once a week in a digest.
I still looked daft occasionally at meetings, but that was for entirely different reasons.