This morning, my wife asked me to fix the printer so that she could print some forms. Sure, I could have spent a few minutes fighting with printer drivers and what-not, but I hate printing and printers – They seriously stab at my soul.
So my solution was to automate her whole process instead.
If you remember the MadLib notepads you had as a kid, then this will be very familiar to you.
The premise is that you have a story with words cut out by type.
For example, “_______ (person in the room) is an excellent _______ (job / profession) who once _______ (verb) a/an _____ (noun) with his/her bare hands”
There would be a separate page with the following form, and while filling it out you can’t see how the words will fit into the final narrative shown above.
| Person in the room | _________ | Job / Profession | _________ | Verb | _________ | Noun | _________ |
Once completed, the form might look like this…
| Person in the room | George | Job / Profession | fireman | Verb | impaled | Noun | shark |
Then you transfer the words into the narrative from earlier and you get the unusual story of George the fireman who impales sharks.
“George is an excellent fireman who once impaled a shark with his bare hands”
Since I was unsure of her internet access at the location of the event, I needed to build something that was completely self-contained and did not need internet access while it was running. She has a Mac, so slapping together a WPF app wasn’t a straightforward option without installing a VM.
I’ve been learning Node.js in my spare time (since @chimon1984 thinks it might catch on one day), so this was a perfect real-world scenario for me. I had about an hour to time-box the project and set off to code it up in my pajamas on a Saturday morning.
The technologies used are all free and very simple to install and get running with. I’m assuming Linux or OS X, but it could be made to run on Windows without many additional steps.
If you want to check out the code and try it yourself, hop on over to the GitHub where I’ve posted the code. Feel free to use it any way you like, as it has a standard MIT license and submit Pull Requests for improvements and updates. There’s a todo.txt section with things I might add to it as I have free time (whenever that mythical time might be).
