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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#241

Post by TeMPOraL »

BrandonMarc wrote: post #155
steven_braham wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jep, love that chart. Recently showed it to a colleague when we were discussing if it's was worth it to automate our domain creating processes.

Every time I look at that chart, my eyes glaze over and I decide not to automate. The title text when alludes to this. I just ... don't get it. I fear I may be a bear of small brain. As someone else mentioned, there are other valuable considerations the chart ignores, such as likelihood and impact of mistakes.

OTOH automating is an acquired skill, so I learned to say "screw it". Unless you feel you're trying to spend a month to save 10 minutes total, go ahead and automate it - that's how you get better at automating more stuff faster.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#242

Post by btown »

VLM wrote: post #177
tchaffee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I evaluated Puppet, Chef, and Ansible and Ansible was by far the easiest for me to learn. My favorite thing I use it for is my personal laptop setup. I can go from clean Ubuntu install to having all the software I use along with system settings all perfect within an hour, without me being involved.

The real world tends to have a diversity of hosts and an automation system that only partially applies is in many ways worse than none at all. I ended up with Ansible because it seems to require nothing on the far side but python2 and ssh. Everything else needed a specific version of a specific client software. CFEngine was particularly awful in a diverse setup, fighting SSL to make puppet work was never fun. I haven…

The funny thing is that with Docker builds, that anti-pattern is cool again. Why bother telling the remote to pull from Git when you can just push it an entire disk image that knows nothing about source control? Of course, those 10K lines are still there, they're just hidden by Docker abstractions :)

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#244

Post by techolic »

imroot wrote: post #239

My expense reports and timesheets. The three shittiest parts of my job every week are: - Approving timesheets - Entering in my timesheets - Entering in my expense reports I've written a script that goes in using a phantom.js script, and automates the submission of my timesheet on Friday afternoon at 3:00 +/- 15minutes. It now takes into account travel time, Holidays, and approving time if I have time approvals due. S…

17 years into the 20th century, and we are still filling timesheets.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#245

Post by ObeyTheGuts »

kvz wrote: post #123

Since I have a toddler in longing for a house with a garden which starts ar 800k EUR in pleasant neighborhoods in Amsterdam now, which is above my paygrade. So i wrote a script that compares surrounding towns on a number of metrics (4+ rated restaurants per citizen for instance) and let's me know when there are houses for sale with a garden facing south (or north but only if it's sufficently long that we are likely t…

Now u ma brother are tru reptilian

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#246

Post by neya »

half0wl wrote: post #238
neya wrote: post #210

I had tons of startup ideas that I'd always wanted to give it a try. After a point, it became frustrating to test them out one by one, either by writing custom applications in Rails or use Wordpress. But, both costed me a significant amount of time. For example, I had this idea for a travel startup for a very, very long time and I decided to build it on Wordpress. The monetization model was selling some E-Commerce it…

Wow, you should definitely sell this as a service. Lots of people in the market validation stage would pay for this (I know I would). > I can send unlimited emails, track opens, analyse them. Handled by my marketing module. I can customize the emails too, of course. I'm curious - what do you use for email sending? How do you handle bounces and ensure deliverability?

Thank you for the feedback :)

For tracking emails, I use Mailgun. For deliverability, I use some standard practices to ensure reasonable deliverability - dedicated IP, sending in batches and analyze, etc.

I don't need complex systems to ensure my campaigns are spammy (guys like MailChimp need it because there are multiple senders) because the sender of these campaigns is just me.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#247

Post by cerberusss »

kvz wrote: post #123

Since I have a toddler in longing for a house with a garden which starts ar 800k EUR in pleasant neighborhoods in Amsterdam now, which is above my paygrade. So i wrote a script that compares surrounding towns on a number of metrics (4+ rated restaurants per citizen for instance) and let's me know when there are houses for sale with a garden facing south (or north but only if it's sufficently long that we are likely t…

At the moment, you will not successfully find a house without paying a realtor. They can view entries into the Funda(1) database before they're publicized. Source: acquaintained photographer who exclusively works for realtors.

(1) Funda.nl is a real estate website that more or less has a monopoly in The Netherlands.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#248

Post by modarts »

xcubic wrote: post #199

In Lausanne, Switzerland, it's very difficult to find an appartement because there are too few appartements for too many people and it mostly follows "First-come, first-served". So I created scrappers for 3 websites + 1 facebook group. It simply looks for apartments with my specifications and notify me when a new one comes up. I can say, I successfully found an apartment. The whole process usually takes at least 3 mo…

Sounds like you've got a business in hand

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#249

Post by egypturnash »

TruthSHIFT wrote: post #218
egypturnash wrote: post #214

I am not a programmer, but I've automated a few things in my life. I self publish graphic novels. I have a script that runs on a directory full of page files and outputs a CSV in the format InDesign expects. I wrote it after manually editing a CSV and leaving a page out, and not noticing that until I had an advance copy in my hands and 400 more waiting to be shipped from the printer. That was an expensive learning ex…

I have some news for you. You are a programmer.

If doing that stuff over about 4 or 5 years or so makes me a programmer, then I'm also a carpenter, because I've put together a few pieces of furniture over the same span.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#250

Post by dragonsky »

hammock wrote: post #173
Noumenon72 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be more complicated than that. The next shirt in line is on the ironing board, not in the closet. I have to wear a tie today! I'm pulling a shirt from down the line. Can I also have a reminder of which pants go best with that shirt? I didn't do laundry yet so half my pants aren't available. Now I did do laundry, so half my pants have only one wear left in them and half have two. Here's a screenshot " rel="nofo…

Maybe you're overcomplicating it? Pulling the next shirt in line is a suggestion, not a requirement. Maybe you want the second or third shirt in the queue. A small amount of common sense is required, but less than if you were looking at your entire wardrobe at once with no other information about it, and trying to make a decision.

I just wear the same thing thing each day, or close enough. Being married Middle Aged male Dev nobody cares as long as I don't smell and I'm reasonably neat. I certainly don't care, nobody to impress.

Having five sets of the same clothes certainly makes life easier. And when I finally do change my attire the office gets a laugh out of the fact I actually went into a clothes shop.

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