Turning Manual Ops Into a 10-Minute Task

I once turned a 2-week manual data update process into a 10-minute automated pipeline by writing a PHP script that ingested a vendor spreadsheet, normalized everything into a temporary MySQL database, and surfaced the result in a review dashboard before pushing to production. This post is the short version of that project — the tools I used, the approach, and the outcome — for any developer staring at a tedious manual ops process and wondering whether it's worth automating. (Spoiler: it almost a