Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

I live in a condo complex with a dog and no lawn. We learned after getting our dog that this place doesn’t want dogs going to the bathroom on any of the common area (makes sense but annoying to dog owners). We used to get a small patch of grass delivered every week but it was a hassle to swap each time. Also it was disgusting by the end of the week. Then I discovered porch potty. Got the version that is hooked up with a sprinkler system and a drain. Set up an auto timer so it gets completely flushed every night. Saves us a bunch of money and time. Highly recommend. https://www.porchpotty.com/

There are plenty of other ways to do this, but...

I have a CC specifically for reoccurring bills. It’s automatically paid off every month and just by looking at that one debit it’s easy to notice if something odd happens and then track down what changed. Plus by adding it all together I tend to trim what services I keep paying for.

Back when Tinder's API was more open, I had a Python script that would autoswipe everyone in the match queue. Then I'd go through all my matches, manually filter the ones I didn't like, and message the ones I did.

It was highly efficient, increased my conversation rate, but didn't really impact my end metrics ;)

I use cron to send myself birthday reminder emails:

  0 0 9 11 *      /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: Nov 9 is Marks birthday" me@mydomain.com

Or just annual reminders or warnings I want to heed:

  0 0 1 8 *       /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: MAKE christmas St. Francis reservations NOW for good pricing..." me@mydomain.com

Sometimes, instead of /usr/bin/mail, I use 'smsme' which is a small script that interfaces with twilio:

  /usr/local/bin/curl -X POST -d "Body=$msg" -d "From=$from" -d "To=$to" "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/$accountsid/Messages" -u "$accountsid:$authtoken"

(that's not the entire script, but you get the idea)

I've used Automate App (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.a...) to set my android phone to silent mode in office and loud at home based on the wifi ssid.