A week with Grain

From our computing intern:
“Hello, I’m James. For the last week I’ve been coming to Grain for work experience. Usually I’d go to Amersham & Wycome College, where I study IT.

Over the week I worked on a few different projects using web technologies such as JavaScript and Python.

One project I worked on was a way of automating screenshots of websites. I wrote a tidy little Python application for inputting the options and URLs before handing off each web address to SlimerJS for rendering. SlimerJS is a scriptable browser engine used for many different things such as testing web applications and measuring performance. Although this worked as intended, the images generated only showed the page contents, without the browser window which was needed.

So out with the new and in with the old. Rather than SlimerJS rendering the page, I used AppleScript, a scripting language for interacting with applications on OSX, to open a URL in a browser, take a screenshot, and then close the browser.

I got to see how a company like Grain works, from the early stages of devising a design, to the creation.”