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

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

#21

Post by sheeeep86 »

It's not fully automate, but I frequently find myself having to do a lot of one off shell tasks, which are not quite worth the effort of writing a bash script. While some command is running I would like to start enqueing the next command.

Technically I could write one command like this and go get a coffee:

cd dir1 && task1 && cd ../dir2 && task2 some arg && etc

But then the task would only start executing when I'm done typing all commands... I want it to start task1 right away and then tkae my time to enter the rest...

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

#22

Post by mickeyp »

arsenide wrote: post #20
mickeyp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 par…

Airflow does not do the work itself; you write stuff in Python, so you _could_ make it do it, but it would be the wrong way forward for large volumes of data if time is of the essence. It merely calls out to stuff that does --- such as other tools that do the processing, and so forth.

One example is perhaps a small python script (run by airflow) to pull the files you need to process; pass them to in a downstream task that runs a shell script; which takes its output and in turn does something else entirely.

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

#23

Post by Jefro118 »

powerbottle wrote: post #3

Does code review and keeping up with code reviews count? I find that I can review PRs from multiple teams in a day and keeping up with them all of them is a lot of effort If there was a bot that kept up with my work and just summarised all the progress since my reviews ... that would really be super useful and I’d likely do more reviews

This might be helpful?: https://pullpanda.com/

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

#24

Post by johnsimer »

sheeeep86 wrote: post #21

It's not fully automate, but I frequently find myself having to do a lot of one off shell tasks, which are not quite worth the effort of writing a bash script. While some command is running I would like to start enqueing the next command. Technically I could write one command like this and go get a coffee: cd dir1 && task1 && cd ../dir2 && task2 some arg && etc But then the task would only start executing when I'm do…

Just use tmux and split your pane

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

#26

Post by Noumenon72 »

robbya wrote: post #6
powerbottle wrote: post #3

Does code review and keeping up with code reviews count? I find that I can review PRs from multiple teams in a day and keeping up with them all of them is a lot of effort If there was a bot that kept up with my work and just summarised all the progress since my reviews ... that would really be super useful and I’d likely do more reviews

I believe GitHub will show a changes since last review view after you review code, new changes are added, and then you return. What software are you using?

Looks like Bitbucket Server got this in version 4.11. I gotta ask my work to upgrade! https://www.atlassian.com/blog/bitbucket/new-features-bitbuc...

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

#27

Post by Noumenon72 »

sellingwebsite wrote: post #15

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

This is mostly a thread of things computer-illiterate people don't realize can be automated, like selecting multiple rows before copying. I think Hacker News is at another level.

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

#30

Post by knguyen0105 »

sheeeep86 wrote: post #21

It's not fully automate, but I frequently find myself having to do a lot of one off shell tasks, which are not quite worth the effort of writing a bash script. While some command is running I would like to start enqueing the next command. Technically I could write one command like this and go get a coffee: cd dir1 && task1 && cd ../dir2 && task2 some arg && etc But then the task would only start executing when I'm do…

I discovered ‘tsp’ last year and it worked great.
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