Curious to hear stories of people who automated their 9 to 5 jobs
Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#2I was a high school teacher in a school that worked primarily with underserved students, who often had transcripts with many academic gaps. So we had to spend more time than usual examining transcripts to make sure students were taking the right classes to graduate. It was a small school, with three teachers and a few support staff. We literally spent hundreds of hours each year poring over text-based transcripts with students, parents, and each other.
I spent one staff training day writing a script that parsed the transcripts and generated a visual transcript for each student. It had gray bars showing how much credit was required in each subject area and subdiscipline area, and green bars showing how much credit students had earned. For students close to graduation, it also generated a list of the classes they needed to take. What used to take 10-15 minutes for each student, and was error-prone, now took 30 seconds to 1 minute.
The really interesting and satisfying part wasn't just noticing how much time was saved. We ended up spending just as much time with each student and parent/guardian, but the conversations focused much more on how students could get through to graduation. What used to be a frustrating period of analyzing past failures became a focus on what students could do now that they were focused on graduation.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#3I had to compile reports from Jira of tickets in a release that weren't "in standard". I wrote some Excel VBA that got the details via the Jira rest interface, formatted a report, and sent it round to the "offenders".
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#4When I worked as a lawyer, one of my tasks as a junior was to check the court lists every day against the spreadsheet of clients we had who were involved in litigation. If their name appeared then I had to send an email to the relevant lawyer containing the information.
This took about 30 - 60 mins each day and was monotonous. Just copying and pasting the client name into the browser search tool.
I automated the process, making a small website which lawyers could add their client and would receive an email if the name appeared in the court lists. I ended up turning it into a small SaaS business for a while and sold a licence to my company.
Not a huge victory but it felt great at the time!
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#5I once took a temp job to get some quick spare cash after a failed startup attempt that wiped out my savings, when I still wanted a bit more time before getting another coding job. I ended up helping with some general office work in a mortgage bank, in a department where some accountants would look at all the applications that fell in the grey areas where it wasn't automatically accepted or rejected. They entered the data in a spreadsheet, then looked at other pages of the spreadsheet to see if it was OK to approve or not. Ultimately, there was no grey area... just humans in the middle when it was close.
So I wrote a button (VBA, in Excel) for them that would just do the lookups, and send the correct email response back to the original loan officer. It worked well. They sent my button to all the loan officers, and that department was no longer needed, at least not for anything other than some basic communications asking applicants for more info once in a while.
I had a fun conversation with their IT department, too, when they found out that a temp had automated a department.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#6I became a manager and delegated everything.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#7I deal quite a lot with JIRA at my job, as this is a corporate tool.
Often, I get questions about the content of these JIRA issues, by issue key: either orally ("hey, what about PRJ-12345 ?"), or in plain text format in email, i.e. "PRJ-12345" _without_ the hyperlink of course. That could result in going to a https://jira.domain.tld/browse/PRJ-12345, or even https://anotherjira.domain.tld/browse/QSK-54321 (yes we have two, separated, instances running).
Like dozens of time a day.
As the JIRA UI does not make it fast enough for me to lookup for such issues so often (and having two different URLs do not help), I wrote a little Hammerspoon script that listen to a keyboard shortcut key.
When I press it:
- if a JIRA issue key is currently highlighted on screen: it just points my browser to it - if no, an interactive auto-suggester appears and I can type in the issue key, so that I can browse to it immediately as well.
Only a very small automation, but I literally save several precious minutes per day. Mentioning here since the idea might be helpful for others...
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#8I was a high school teacher in a school that worked primarily with underserved students, who often had transcripts with many academic gaps. So we had to spend more time than usual examining transcripts to make sure students were taking the right classes to graduate. It was a small school, with three teachers and a few support staff. We literally spent hundreds of hours each year poring over text-based transcripts wit…
These small, simple things are the reason why I truly love technology.
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#9I once took a temp job to get some quick spare cash after a failed startup attempt that wiped out my savings, when I still wanted a bit more time before getting another coding job. I ended up helping with some general office work in a mortgage bank, in a department where some accountants would look at all the applications that fell in the grey areas where it wasn't automatically accepted or rejected. They entered the…
Was there a job offer / spot bonus?
Re: Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
#10I work in compliance for a major bank. Our process to investigate odd spending/payment patterns could not have been more manual. Essentially, cases alert according to a variety of rules and you investigate accordingly. Everything starts in Excel and you know what to look for based on why the case alerts. I automated everything (analysis) required in Excel using VBA. Did not know any programming prior to this but I did know this was the point of using computers ("bicycle for the mind"). Learning VBA was a little painful but eventually I figured out how to control a web browser with it so I would pull the required documents from the web. From there, I got Excel and Word to talk and auto-generated our summary memos. So, pretty effectively automated myself out of my position. The lesson is, while I thought it was all pretty straight-forward, many of my colleagues found my new work flow challenging to use and were pretty concerned my path would put us out of work eventually, which was only kind of the goal. Have since rewritten everything in Python, which is a comparative joy, and I'm now working on using machine learning, NLP, NLG to replicate some of the same work to be more intelligently automated.