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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

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31–40 of 234 posts

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#31

Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance, developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright . Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.

Ah this looks great. I'm super happy I'm learning about this project. Do you guys have any plans of adding extensions ala puppeteer-extra?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#32

Autohotkey on windows is my goto tool. I don;t know much about it but I can do the basics like move mouse to x.y coordinate and click it, or send a string of keystrokes to a form etc.

It is much easier to do those actions with Python (https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/chapter20/)

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#33

Autohotkey on windows is my goto tool. I don;t know much about it but I can do the basics like move mouse to x.y coordinate and click it, or send a string of keystrokes to a form etc.

Autohotkey is such a beast. I really miss that now that I've started using Linux. i spent nearly 4 years writing scripts to automate all sorts of things in windows but to recreate them on linux might take me much longer since i would have to learn maybe 6 or 7 different programs just to get the same features. but alas Windows was doing my head in so I had to jump ship!

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#34
Last week I built an automated expense tracking dashboard on Tableau using SendGrid and Google Sheets. I use a Gmail filter to forward my credit card transaction emails to an Inbound Parser setup on SendGrid, which makes a POST call to my home server with the content of the email. A regex then captures the details from the POST body and pushes them to a Google Sheet.

Next I use Tableau Public to read data from Google Sheets and publish a dashboard to Tableau Public Online. Tableau Public automatically refreshes data on the server side from Google Sheets every few hours.

The good part is that all of this can run automatically without any manual intervention whatsoever and I get a beautiful near real-time dashboard for my daily expenses that I can access from anywhere (dashboard is publicly accessible but hidden).

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#35
post #23
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you build these bots or got them from somewhere?

Some are are custom built from apis but I daresay you can find just about anything to hit a webhook or integrate into slack or elsewhere nowadays. Some examples are https://littlebirdie.io/ I use to filter hackernews, Zapier for RSS & filtering feeds, google calendar etc, nothing complicated, just know what you need from a specific service then figure out a way to get it to yourself in a recurring distraction free ma…

Wait isn’t having a bot send you notifications all day the opposite of “distraction free”?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#36

Autohotkey on windows is my goto tool. I don;t know much about it but I can do the basics like move mouse to x.y coordinate and click it, or send a string of keystrokes to a form etc.

Autohotkey is such a beast. I really miss that now that I've started using Linux. i spent nearly 4 years writing scripts to automate all sorts of things in windows but to recreate them on linux might take me much longer since i would have to learn maybe 6 or 7 different programs just to get the same features. but alas Windows was doing my head in so I had to jump ship!

Autohotkey is also a tool I sorely miss since I moved to linux so many years ago. Sadly, there is no linux-equivalent and no one seems keen on porting AHK to linux.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#37

Last week I built an automated expense tracking dashboard on Tableau using SendGrid and Google Sheets. I use a Gmail filter to forward my credit card transaction emails to an Inbound Parser setup on SendGrid, which makes a POST call to my home server with the content of the email. A regex then captures the details from the POST body and pushes them to a Google Sheet. Next I use Tableau Public to read data from Google…

Are you comfortable sharing your personal expenses with so many public sources?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#38

Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance, developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright . Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.

Hi thanks for mentioning your project. Are there any plans to use it for automated UI testing for desktop apps? Selenium supports it (more or less) with WinAppDriver, which is another project from Microsoft.

https://github.com/microsoft/WinAppDriver

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#39

Last week I built an automated expense tracking dashboard on Tableau using SendGrid and Google Sheets. I use a Gmail filter to forward my credit card transaction emails to an Inbound Parser setup on SendGrid, which makes a POST call to my home server with the content of the email. A regex then captures the details from the POST body and pushes them to a Google Sheet. Next I use Tableau Public to read data from Google…

Are you comfortable sharing your personal expenses with so many public sources?

Tableau Public is the one that makes me uncomfortable. If this dashboard continues to work well and be useful I'll look into self-hosted alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you comfortable sharing your personal expenses with so many public sources?

Tableau Public is the one that makes me uncomfortable. If this dashboard continues to work well and be useful I'll look into self-hosted alternatives.

Metabase may be of interest as an alternative
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