Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#11

Post by smt88 » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

pitcher wrote: post #9

byoung2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meetings / stand ups We have recently automated stand ups, so the what I did yesterday/what I will do today/blockers are all pulled from Jira so now we only discuss major sprint goals and how to unblock any blockers...this reduces the meeting to just the important stuff

nice Does this mean keeping all status up to date in Jira? would you mind sharing how you do this?

> would you mind sharing how you do this?

Not GP and not my personal experience, but I have a friend whose company has a non-developer do this as part of their full-time responsibilities. They privately check in with every developer at the end of every day.

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#12

Post by pks016 » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

Not related to software.

I have to feed and give fresh & vitamin water to birds almost everyday. I wish, I could automate that somehow.

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#13

Post by mytailorisrich » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

byoung2 wrote: post #4

pitcher wrote: post #2

Repeated tasks, low structure but high effort: - Finding files that are relevant to my work - Meetings / stand ups - Creating status reports and communicating progress with work I often find that tasks I do repeatedly is often not automatable due to high contextual information that is required to do so

Meetings / stand ups We have recently automated stand ups, so the what I did yesterday/what I will do today/blockers are all pulled from Jira so now we only discuss major sprint goals and how to unblock any blockers...this reduces the meeting to just the important stuff

Doesn't that completely negate the point of a stand up?

A stand up is already short and down to "the important stuff" and it is a key part of the process that the people attending express themselves and listen.

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#14

Post by opportune » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

heres a potentially easy one: create a tool that behaves exactly like outlook rules to the user but can be applied to gmail

I spend too much time looking at email and can’t seem to get the hang of the gmail labels system

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#15

Post by sellingwebsite » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 7:26 PM UTC

you will find numerous examples of what can be automated on this thread https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ebp6ak/there_is_...

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#16

Post by davchana » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #14

heres a potentially easy one: create a tool that behaves exactly like outlook rules to the user but can be applied to gmail I spend too much time looking at email and can’t seem to get the hang of the gmail labels system

A possible solution is: coarsely label the incoming mail, or just label everything incoming if coarse label is not possible.

In Google Apps Script, fetch all mail with that label, process as wanted, like sending replies, moving, deleting; & then remove the label.

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#17

Post by arsenide » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 8:14 PM UTC

We have many software programs that need to be run in sequence to transform a set of data from one form (on the order of tens to hundreds of GB) into a bunch of different output file formats. At some points the tools need to be run linearly, and at other points there are a few tools that need to be run in a branched fashion and then their outputs are combined in some complicated way using the next tool. Some of these tools take on the order of up to days to run, so an improper configuration due to human error loses time (pretty common given the complexity of work). Often the time lost is on the order of days.

These tools need to be configured in certain ways depending on the business needs.

Having a nice way to look at the dataflow as a whole, configure these tools on a global level within some framework, and be able to nicely distribute the work on our internal server farm would be worth a good bit of money to the company.

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#18

Post by lowdose » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 8:30 PM UTC

Acquiring knowledge. Auto flash card question generation based on the things I read, listen and watch.

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#19

Post by mickeyp » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

arsenide wrote: post #17

We have many software programs that need to be run in sequence to transform a set of data from one form (on the order of tens to hundreds of GB) into a bunch of different output file formats. At some points the tools need to be run linearly, and at other points there are a few tools that need to be run in a branched fashion and then their outputs are combined in some complicated way using the next tool. Some of these…

This is a common problem and for one you'll find many different solutions.

I used Apache Airflow some years ago to do exactly this. It's pretty good. You build a workflow of tasks (in Python) and set a schedule of how often you want it run. It then runs these tasks on any number of machines that you run the Airflow worker on to orchestrate the running of whatever it is you are trying to do.

If a task fails it can notify you; and if you "miss" a run it can backfill it provided your toolchain understands the concept of time. Very useful for hourly/daily feeds that, if you miss one, the system can go back and retry it just for the slots it missed.

Comes with a nice UI, too.

Re: Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

#20

Post by arsenide » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 8:53 PM UTC

mickeyp wrote: post #19

arsenide wrote: post #17

We have many software programs that need to be run in sequence to transform a set of data from one form (on the order of tens to hundreds of GB) into a bunch of different output file formats. At some points the tools need to be run linearly, and at other points there are a few tools that need to be run in a branched fashion and then their outputs are combined in some complicated way using the next tool. Some of these…

This is a common problem and for one you'll find many different solutions. I used Apache Airflow some years ago to do exactly this. It's pretty good. You build a workflow of tasks (in Python) and set a schedule of how often you want it run. It then runs these tasks on any number of machines that you run the Airflow worker on to orchestrate the running of whatever it is you are trying to do. If a task fails it can not…

I’m glancing at the documentation, and came across this line:

“Airflow is not a data streaming solution. Tasks do not move data from one to the other (though tasks can exchange metadata!)“

Many of our tools take on the order of 5-200gb of data and do either some transformation (which gets passed along to the next tool; similar size, possibly after another automated validation step) and/or validation (whereby this particular branch of workflow ceases).

The automated modules we have are self-contained; each task in our case is “data + config parameters in, data out”, then use “data out” as “data in” after choosing configuration parameters for the next step.

Would this still be a good usecase — am I misunderstanding what the above quote is about?