💻 Solving a Compatibility Gap & Creating New Network Automation Tools

💻 Solving a Compatibility Gap & Creating New Network Automation Tools

When your tools don’t work on your platform, build your own to keep the workflow moving.

At work, we have great automation tools for Meraki network management, but they’re designed for Windows. I work on a Mac, so instead of switching systems, I decided to create my own Mac-compatible versions of these tools using Python and the Meraki Dashboard API.

With AI-assisted coding, I:

  • Rebuilt existing company tools so they run natively on macOS, keeping workflows consistent with our Windows-based processes.
  • Created brand-new automation scripts that didn’t exist before, including:
    • Resizing & embedding photos into Excel-based network documentation in the correct format
    • Reading text from images and renaming files to match an approved naming list, logging every change
    • Switch network inventory listing with MAC addresses and details pulled directly from the Meraki API

This involved:

  • Designing workflows to match operational needs
  • Defining exact business logic for each automation
  • Iteratively refining, testing, and validating the scripts in production
  • Ensuring I could maintain and adapt them without AI assistance

🔹 Important Note on AI Use:
No company data was shared with ChatGPT during development. The AI was only provided with high-level concepts and logic to assist with coding. All scripts are company-agnostic — they can run in any Meraki environment, since configurations are read from Excel documents and nothing is hard-coded into the Python scripts.

The result:
✅ Tools now work seamlessly on macOS
✅ Brand-new functions that save time and reduce manual errors
✅ More consistent, automated network documentation

This project deepened my skills in Python scripting, API integration, and cross-platform automation, and reinforced that AI is best used as a development accelerator — not a replacement for technical expertise.

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