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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#171

Post by Noumenon72 »

hammock wrote: post #141
saimiam wrote: post #124

My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated. It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on w…

For the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.

It can be more complicated than that. The next shirt in line is on the ironing board, not in the closet. I have to wear a tie today! I'm pulling a shirt from down the line. Can I also have a reminder of which pants go best with that shirt? I didn't do laundry yet so half my pants aren't available. Now I did do laundry, so half my pants have only one wear left in them and half have two.

Here's a screenshot" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/VNJ08Ra.png">screenshot of the thing I made in Flask to keep track. Orange needs to be washed next time I wear it, red needs to be washed now.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#172

Post by lj3 »

dtech wrote: post #140
nfriedly wrote: post #114

Paying all of my bills. All of them. My bank (Fidelity) can connect to most bigger companies to have the bills automatically sent to them and then they automatically pay it (with an optional upper limit on each biller). For other bills, I got all but one to put me on "budget billing" (same amount each month, so Fidelity just sends them a check for that amount without seeing the bill). For Windstream, which varies by…

As an European, it seems amazing that you even need to automate half of this stuff/that it is a perk of a single bank. Over here nearly everything recurring is done with direct debit, in which you authorize corporations to directly and automatically withdraw funds from your bank account, and it's a required feature if you want to connect to the European payment system. (don't worry, you can charge it back in case of…

> in which you authorize corporations to directly and automatically withdraw funds from your bank account

The corporations over there must be more trustworthy than the ones we have over here. I'd never agree to such a thing.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#173

Post by hammock »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #171
hammock wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.

It can be more complicated than that. The next shirt in line is on the ironing board, not in the closet. I have to wear a tie today! I'm pulling a shirt from down the line. Can I also have a reminder of which pants go best with that shirt? I didn't do laundry yet so half my pants aren't available. Now I did do laundry, so half my pants have only one wear left in them and half have two. Here's a screenshot " rel="nofo…

Maybe you're overcomplicating it? Pulling the next shirt in line is a suggestion, not a requirement. Maybe you want the second or third shirt in the queue. A small amount of common sense is required, but less than if you were looking at your entire wardrobe at once with no other information about it, and trying to make a decision.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#174

Post by antoinealb »

noahdesu wrote: post #165

I frequently wipe and install from scratch my Linux desktop and laptops. I've been spending more time recently working on setup scripts that automate as much of this as possible. Things like installing packages, setting up firewall, checking out code projects and installing dependencies. Currently this is mostly a bash script plus my dot-files, but I'm always looking for ways to improve this process.

I personally do this using SaltStack. The biggest gain from Bash scripts are that Salt stack are idempotents, meaning you can apply them several time and Salt will figure out by itself the states that need changes.

Chef, puppet or Ansible are also good options I heard.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#175

Post by jpitz »

iamwil wrote: post #164
patd wrote: post #42

Most of my side projects have been about automating the little things that end up taking me a lot of time. At my first job, part of my work (next to junior dev) was to deploy EARs on Websphere. I automated it so that people just had to drop it on a shared folder and I'd just take a look if it failed to install automatically. I wrote a command-line tool to search and download subtitles https://github.com/patrickdessal…

What is EARs?

It is a file format for java applications designed to run on J2EE servers like JBOSS, Websphere, Weblogic, etc. It is a zip file with conventions on certain files and folders in the package.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAR_(file_format)

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#176

Post by tjalfi »

saimiam wrote: post #124

My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated. It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on w…

This reminds me of a quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann!.

When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind - nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again - I had the solution to that problem.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#177

Post by VLM »

tchaffee wrote: post #46
The_Notorious wrote: post #27

Find yourself a configuration management server such as Puppet, Chef, CFEngine etc, and learn to automate system deployment and management with it. I use Puppet CE as my main automation tool. Use Python/Shell for tasks that are not well suited for a configuration management server. Usually, this is when procedural code makes more sense than the declarative style of Puppet manifests. Interactive "wizards" (i.e. add do…

I evaluated Puppet, Chef, and Ansible and Ansible was by far the easiest for me to learn. My favorite thing I use it for is my personal laptop setup. I can go from clean Ubuntu install to having all the software I use along with system settings all perfect within an hour, without me being involved.

The real world tends to have a diversity of hosts and an automation system that only partially applies is in many ways worse than none at all.

I ended up with Ansible because it seems to require nothing on the far side but python2 and ssh. Everything else needed a specific version of a specific client software. CFEngine was particularly awful in a diverse setup, fighting SSL to make puppet work was never fun. I haven't found anything Ansible won't talk to, or can't be made to talk to eventually. I used Puppet for a bit less than a decade before switching to Ansible maybe two years ago, and I don't miss fighting its SSL at all. I miss when the puppetmaster would randomly crash and I'd find out when a deployment failed or worse failed partially, or when the puppetmaster process would take 5 minutes to start because, well, I donno why, but it sure was annoying.

One interesting anti-pattern I saw over the years was people using puppet (or ansible or otherwise) as the worlds weirdest version control system. You can git pull a release branch, or you can write 10K custom lines (no kidding) of automation software to replace one line of 'git pull'. Depends if you're paid by hour/LoC or not. The borderline between "this is managed with ansible/puppet/wtf" and "this is managed by living in a git repo" can be annoyingly fuzzy and going to either extreme doesn't turn out well...

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#178

Post by andai »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #88

In 2003 I had a perl script to query the job boards for keywords , scrap the result and send out an application email with CV attached to it (I took care to send one application to a single email). I think this was a legitimate form of spamming - at that moment the local job market was very bad.

Tool-assisted job hunting!

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#179

Post by bhalperin »

rcarmo wrote: post #47

- Data pipelines (as seen elsewhere here) - Anything related to infra (I do Azure, so I write Azure templates to deploy everything, even PaaS/FaaS stuff) - Linux provisioning (cloud-init, Ansible, and a Makefile to tailor/deploy my dotfiles on new systems) - Mail filing (I have the usual sets of rules, plus a few extra to bundle together related e-mails on a topic and re-file as needed) - Posting links to my blog (wi…

> private RSS feed for Overcast

I for one would be interested in reading more about how you set this up!

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#180

Post by gottlos »

Shopping list via Oscar, barcode scanner, open food facts

Aircon via temp sensors and node-samsung-airconditioner

still working on Owntracks/mqtt for useful automations on arrival home

lights plus motion sensor, lihht color by time of day (red at late night to save vision)

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