The dutch government and other (bigger) organisations seem to have a habit to annoy people. One of the reasons they do so is security by obscurity. It has it’s flaw as shown in this blogpost by @levelsio.
He wrote a little script that fetches and forwards all the email, which everyone can do after loggin in with DigiD. As shown, this takes a lot of steps. Automating it can be done with less then 50 lines of code.
I recently moved to a new home, and I got a freshly installed new electricity meter that’s a little bit more intelligent. It was now possible for me to sign up for slimmemeterportal.nl, that let’s you access the power-usage data from the meter by a 15 minute window. That’s quite some data to play with!
Being interested in the data, I wrote a little scraper that collects it for me and stores it in a SQL database, from there on, with Flask and Peewee it was quite simple to create a little API for my own dataset.