Case study
Restock Hunting: From a Discord Alert to a Completed Order
During COVID shortages I built a chain of small tools: read deals posted in a Discord channel, locate what I wanted, open only those links automatically, and let a browser script check out if the price was right.
OutcomeThe end result was a system I could leave running instead of constantly watching Discord and hoping I noticed the right alert in time.
The historical analysis pulled 7,186 unique product identifiers from the exported channel data. Of those, 6,556 were enriched with a full category path, while the remaining 630 still had enough information to keep as partial records. That gave me a structured dataset I could sort and filter down to the components I actually cared about.
Once those targets were defined, the live automation handled the time-sensitive part. Relevant alerts could be identified and opened immediately, while everything else was ignored. From there, the Tampermonkey script could complete checkout automatically as long as the product and price matched the rules I had already set.
The biggest improvement wasn't any single script. It was removing human reaction time from the process. Instead of needing to monitor Discord at exactly the right moment, I could decide what I wanted ahead of time and let the tools handle the repetitive steps between an alert appearing and an order being placed.
The project also ended up being a useful lesson in building automation incrementally. Each stage solved one bottleneck and exposed the next, eventually turning what started as a simple attempt to find PC parts into a complete data extraction and purchasing pipeline.
