Finding an apartment: Software Developer Edition

It was new years eve on 2019 when I just had diagnosed with depression, couple of months before I had a harsh break up, I didn't enjoy my work, I procrastinated A LOT, I was tight on money - I was lost and angry at myself. At this point I had been working mainly remotely for almost a year, I visited the office 1-2 times a week - it was 2 hour drive in one way.

I had an idea, that at this point of my life I should invest in my career, also after a break up moving to another city could be refreshing. My Idea was that I would move closer to my workplace, so I could visit the office more often.

Then I started thinking what kind of apartment I would like, how much I'm willing and able to pay rent, and is there anyone I know already. Would be perfect to live near some of my friends, so I would know someone from the city beforehand. This just brings me some mental safety regarding to moving to a new city.

I knew that my friend lives in a nice area and there is only 15 minutes drive to my workplace - I phoned him and asked if they are planning to move in next year, he said no. So I decided to start looking apartments from there.

Code for the win!

I browsed rental apartments throughout the days and I found myself googling the addresses and comparing how long distance is there to my friends place and to my workplace. It was annoying and slow process.

So the coder in me woke up. I wrote a script to fetch all the apartments from the website - with suitable filters. Then I added Google Maps API and asked for each apartments address the distance to my friends place.

Endresult was a list of apartments sorted by the distance to my friends apartment.

I ran the script multiple times a day, manually, in my terminal. So I would know if any new apartments come available.

This is a good example of how coding skills can help outside of your job.

Eventually I found an amazing apartment just under a kilometer away from my friends place!

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