31–40 of 349 posts
I take enormous pleasure in automating every part of my research pipelines (comp sci). As in, I like to get my experiment setup (usually distributed and many different components interacting with each other) to a point where one command resets all components, starts them in screen processes on all of the machines with the appropriate timing and setup commands, runs the experiment(s), moves the results between machine…
- Adding tasks to my todolist client from every app I use(including my bookmarking service when I bookmark with specific tags)
- Changing terminal colours based on time of the day(lower brightness in the evenings and hence dark colours, too much sunlight in the mornings and hence solarized themes)
- Automatically message people who message me based on priority(parents immediately/girlfriend a longer buffer).
- Filters on said messages incase a few require my intervention
- Phone alerts on specific emails
- Waiting for a server which you were working with to recover from a 503(happens often in dev environments) and you are tired of checking every 5 seconds: Ping scripts which message my phone while I go play in the rec area.
- Disable my phone charging when it nears 95% (I'm an android dev and hate that my phone is always charging)
- Scraping websites for specific information and making my laptop ping when the scenario succeeds(I dont like continuously refreshing a page)
I dont think several of these count as automation as opposed to just some script work. But I prefer reducing keystrokes as much as possible for things which are fixed.
Relevant to this discussion:Excerpt from the github page
>OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.
I have a script that downloads bank and credit card transaction data, then applies rules to create a journal in GNU Ledger format.
Do you use an API? Or just scraping? I've done the same, but stopped using it. Afraid my bank, if they detect it, might not like it.
Simple web interface where I have a list of packages I've ordered with the last status update from post service web tracking for.
I'm the kind of nerd who greatly prefers writing automation code to doing anything remotely repetitive. (I'm afraid to work out the actual timings because I'm pretty sure that I often spend more time coming up with the automation than just doing the task would take). 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…
Maybe this can save you some trouble:
A bot for reserving hotel rooms. I wrote a bot to reserve hotel rooms a year in advance for a national park in the US. It was so difficult to book. After couple days of failed attempts to reserve my desired dates, and after staying up late into the night one day, I went ahead and wrote a bot to automate the task of checking for availability and then completing the checkout process once available. And... it worked.
I take enormous pleasure in automating every part of my research pipelines (comp sci). As in, I like to get my experiment setup (usually distributed and many different components interacting with each other) to a point where one command resets all components, starts them in screen processes on all of the machines with the appropriate timing and setup commands, runs the experiment(s), moves the results between machine…