Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

I've got a script that automatically rips, converts and stitches together audiobooks from the library so that I can play them on my phone. It just beeps periodically to tell me to put the next CD in.

I also had a batch job that downloaded Doonesbury cartoons (including some delay logic so I wasn't hammering the server) and built a linked series of html pages by year and month. I've ported it to a couple of other webcomics so that I can binge read.

I also write a lot of LaTeX macros, doing things like automatically import and format code from a github gist into lecture notes (something like \includegist{C,), or autogenerate pretty PDF'd marks summaries for students from my home-rolled marks. database.

Another thing I like is building little toys to demonstrate things for students, like a Mathematica page that calculated the convergence rate and error for the trapezoidal rule (numerical integration) with some pretty diagrams.

I once wrote a bunch of lisp code to help with crypto puzzles (the ones that use a substitution code, and you try to figure out the original text). The code did things like identifying letter, digraph and trigraph frequencies, allowed you to test substitutions, etc.

As developers, we tend to focus on these big integrated projects. But one of the biggest advantages that people who can code have is the ability to quickly get a general purpose computer to assist with individual tasks. I write an awful lot of code that only gets run a handful of times, yet some of those projects were the most pleasure I've ever had writing code.

Around 3 years ago, we started to get a lot of customers for our VoIP tunneling solution, mostly from UAE. Most of these were unfriendly customers abusing our support, so I started to implement a CRM to track "support points". I spend a half year to develop this solution (with lots of other functionality such as service monitoring) and when I finished, there was no any demand for the VoIP tunneling solution anymore :)

This is how I wasted half year instead to focus to solutions relevant for our business.

Thanks good, we started to have new customers again since last year and actually my CRM/support point tracking software is very useful now, but I still don't think that it worth’s 6 months’ time investment.

Conclusion: focus on your main business and don’t spend too much time with automation and other helper software (or hire somebody to do it if your business is big enough)

I wrote a simple lua script for freeswitch that dials the line, follows the prompts, and plays the person's greeting to the PBX. Of course, one day, the damn PBX will be replaced by freeswitch.