281–290 of 349 posts
Most of my side projects have been about automating the little things that end up taking me a lot of time. At my first job, part of my work (next to junior dev) was to deploy EARs on Websphere. I automated it so that people just had to drop it on a shared folder and I'd just take a look if it failed to install automatically. I wrote a command-line tool to search and download subtitles https://github.com/patrickdessal…
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…
When talking about reproducibiluty in science, it's usually about the availability of original data to verify that the original conclusions were correct, but one level higher there's also computational reproducibility with its own challenges (freezing the original environment of the experiment).
So-called orphan repositories (i.e. content doesn't fit into any other bucket) like Zenodo welcome your articles, datasets and code.
I was at university, and Farmville was all the rage on Facebook. My girlfriend wanted me to play because it'd mean she'd be able to trade stuff with me or something (I forget why exactly), and I eventually caved in.
After ten minutes of playing it, I was bored. I couldn't really judge people that would click plants hundreds of times, several times a day, though, because I played World of Warcraft. It was just a more interesting type of grinding...
I figured out that in order to grind through the game most efficiently, I'd need to plant Tomatoes every two hours, so I wrote a bot that would:
1. Spin up a VM.
2. Open the browser to Farmville.
3. Open up an automated clicking application I had written that worked on Flash.
4. Find the outermost vegetable patch.
5. Click in a 20x20 grid (or however big the whole area was).
6. Replant, and close.
I didn't tell my girlfriend about the bot, and I'd turn it off when I went to visit her, so she was shocked when she went on my farm to see that I was a higher level than her. I'd jokingly feign ignorance, saying that I was just playing it like her, until one day when I had left the script running and she saw my farm picking itself while I was studying.
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For the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.
And of course, there's the "buy a full set of interchangeable socks" approach. I did this a few years ago and it's great. Pairing socks seems trivial but saving 10-20 minutes a week, every week, for minimal investment (I needed socks anyway) is a huge win. One caveat, though - if you do this, commit to it. Don't do what I did and keep one or two pairs of non-conforming socks just because I liked them. Because now the…
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> So you claim that Ansible learns the state of the system through some magic that is not possible to be called from shell? I never claimed that. > Because I could do pretty much the same in a shell script just fine. So could I. But I didn't have to. Because Ansible does it for me. So right there, just by comparing my declarative configuration with the current system state, it's clearly adding more value than "shell…
> So right there, just by comparing my declarative configuration with the current system state, it's clearly adding more value than "shell script executer". Very little value in this regard. As I said, I could just as easily write declarative configuration for machine deployment in a shell script. >> There are many big companies that throw money at dumb processes only to make them running > You said it can't scale. Y…
While you were over there thinking about it, I had already completed the job. Which was my #1 requirement. It doesn't seem like you'll ever understand that different requirements often result in different tool choices, but that's ok.
> But now you're probably worse off
Probably not. I now have several things automated that I once had to do manually. I may not be the smartest person in tech, but I'm smart enough that if I need a better solution than Ansible at some point in my career then at that point I'll simply learn the better solution. Different requirements = different tool choices.
I need to upload invoices every month from all ~20 SaaS products I subscribe to an accounting software. Most of the invoices can be just redirected from email to another SaaS that will let me download a zip file containing all invoices from a date range. Other software requires me to login to the product, navigate to a page and download a PDF or print an HTML page. I have browser-automated all of these laborious ones…
I've been thinking about automating this myself. Which Saas is it? ("another SaaS that will let me download a zip file containing all invoices from a date range.")
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…