In an interview with a potential client a few years ago, they wanted a demonstration of how I might attack an issue in an off-the-cuff situation through scripting. Since my website I market my services through included "custom code", they wanted to see if I wrote it or if I hired others. I happily obliged with a live demonstration, so long as I was allowed to open source the code when I was done.
They asked me to scrape a website for anything I wanted, so long as I wrote it in front of them and explained what I was doing as I went. When looking for inspiration of what to code, I thought about the recent formation of COPA Coders and the free magazine I was sharing with the students so they could learn more in between dojo meetings. I wrote a bash version of the script and later moved it to python. Both versions are available at GitHub:
