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Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#21

Post by s_kilk »

onion2k wrote: post #9
david90 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 3 seconds thinking this is a spam lol

It's a response to a problem the customer has raised. In that context it won't look like spam. I'm not keen on the conciliatory tone and going straight to a 'bribe' of a refund/offer/etc, but in some markets that could work. If I had it as a response I'd feel like I was getting a brush-off rather than someone was trying to engage with me and fix my problem. If someone is willing to go to the effort of making a compla…

I think they meant the post looked like automated HN spam, until it 'clicked' that it was just a dump of an email template :)

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#22

Post by jlgaddis »

My fellow employees and I are supposed to send a "time sheet" detailing how many hours we work, how much time we spent working on "x" and "y", etc., via e-mail every week (by noon on Monday for the previous week).

I have a cron job that fires off a Perl script at 8:45 a.m. every Monday morning that composes that e-mail and sends it off for me.

On the rare occasion that I was on vacation the previous week (and forgot to disable it), I just text our payroll lady and tell her to "ignore that e-mail, I was on vacation last week".

She knows it's automated and she doesn't care. She's required to receive an e-mail from me before she pays me and that satisfies her requirements. The boss knows too, he just shook his head and laughed when I told him about it.

It sorta reminds me of how, when a "measure productivity by number of tickets closed" policy gets enacted, everyone just starts creating tickets for every menial thing they do.

My second favorite is the one that runs once an hour, deleting any IP addressing / DHCP lease / similar data older than 24 hours (I work for an ISP).

Sorry, IP-Echelon, the company policy (which I wrote and enacted) says we don't keep that (IP User) data for more than a day, so I can't "ensure the user and/or IP address owner refrains from future use and sharing" because I don't know and can't tell who it was.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#23

Post by herbst »

k__ wrote: post #19
pawelkomarnicki wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got the Slack hype...

Problem is, 99% of it is crap. Slack is okay and there are some really good bots for it. But everyone jumps on that train and so for every good integration there are 20 bad ones, that spam your channel with stuff no one needs to know :\ Takes a bit time to find the good things.

Most of my integrations (except github) are manually crafted. I agree that most bots are just spamming shitholes. Especially the new generation of bots that randomly reminds you to vote for them on some stupid bot stores.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#24

Post by vertex-four »

onion2k wrote: post #9
david90 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 3 seconds thinking this is a spam lol

It's a response to a problem the customer has raised. In that context it won't look like spam. I'm not keen on the conciliatory tone and going straight to a 'bribe' of a refund/offer/etc, but in some markets that could work. If I had it as a response I'd feel like I was getting a brush-off rather than someone was trying to engage with me and fix my problem. If someone is willing to go to the effort of making a compla…

I once used the built-in contact form in a webapp to tell the creators that one of the ads they were showing was malware. They thanked me, and I got a couple of free months' premium service out of it. I was very happy with that - it was a relatively minor complaint on my part, I was a free user, and they got a paid customer for a few months after their gift expired out of that.

Generally I think that'd work for the majority of free users of a service. For paying customers, though, you sort of have to triage between minor complaints and ones that will lose you a customer quickly if you don't look like you're solving it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#28

Post by vollmond »

Nothing at my current position, but on a previous team we had a rigorous code review policy without a tool (FishEye/Crucible, etc) to facilitate it. I wrote a bash script that accepted a ticket number as a parameter. It scanned SVN for all commits associated with that ticket.

For each file, it would diff the original version with the last version committed against the ticket, and pop the diffs up sequentially in Vim (IE, one end-to-end diff for each source file).

I'm sure there's a better way, but this worked well enough at the time.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#29

Post by kzisme »

akerro wrote: post #18

The one that scans inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time". More serious, I have a script that uses gitlab and gitlabci that integrates it with FDroid repo and builds a…

For those curious about what he is referencing: https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts
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