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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
11–20 of 234 posts
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#12Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance,
developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright.
Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#13I use Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff around my house. The one I use at least daily is a trigger based on the light switch in my bedroom. A double click down triggers an automation that turns off all the lights in the rest of the house, makes sure the garage doors are closed, and that the rest of the doors are locked.
Bad bot!
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#14I started with selenium and still use it when I have to but try to just make http requests and parse responses directly whenever possible. Probably my favorite travel-related script was one that watched for an opening at a hard to book hotel and snatched it up when it became available.
and to parse the responses (Assuming they're HTML page sources, not json/xml) - you using scrapy or something else?
I pretty much always use lxml. It has an html method but I typically just use etree.parse(). It's very fast and has excellent XPath query support.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#15I've used IFTTT a bit, along with Zapier. Biggest issue is trying to do multiple actions when you need to automate tasks for multiple rows of data at a time.
Look at Integromat. I used to use Zapier but have moved mostly over to this instead.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#16Autohotkey on windows is my goto tool. I don;t know much about it but I can do the basics like move mouse to x.y coordinate and click it, or send a string of keystrokes to a form etc.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#17Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance, developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright . Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.
Any plans for a visual editor like Kantu?
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#18I have a slack workspace that has several bots, some listen for specific keywords and or phrases around the web and post to the relevant channels. Other bots remind me if I'm slacking off (maybe stayed a little too long on youtube), remind me of appointments, to drink water, if a stock price falls and some more. Also have filtered rss feeds for business and finance news etc. All of these bots also have custom identities that make it much more engaging like Axelrod is my bot for finance related news.
Others tell me if my server is getting swamped, forward important emails like renewing a cert, a deploy failed, bug in prod or something else that requires often immediate attention. Chat widgets from sites in production also go directly to Slack so I can reply quickly if needed. (Gmail, Sentry, Freshchat, Ploi etc, integrate them all and filter out what's critical).
Everything generally operates on a 15 min interval or so it's not noisy and I've pretty much tuned it to only receiving specific stuff I want to see. Having a central assistant like hub to go to is very useful and time saving.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#19I use tasker on android along with a plugin to automate turning down my screen brightness in the evenings, turning off screen rotation in a particular orientation for specific apps (IE I prefer to text in portrait mode since I can see what I'm replying to).
I've semiautomated setting up a new laptop using a private repo with my dot files with some bash scripts. Started with linux, now works with Mac os x (but won't handle linux well and I haven't gone back enough to make it worth case by case stuff).
I still have to generate a public private key pair, and some things on macs aren't perfect, but I have a todo list for the non automated things in the repo. I get going less on new macs nowdays since the keyboards are such crap (fingers crossed this year will bring better 13 inch keyboards), but everytime I do it I add something.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#20I have a slack workspace that has several bots, some listen for specific keywords and or phrases around the web and post to the relevant channels. Other bots remind me if I'm slacking off (maybe stayed a little too long on youtube), remind me of appointments, to drink water, if a stock price falls and some more. Also have filtered rss feeds for business and finance news etc. All of these bots also have custom identit…
Did you build these bots or got them from somewhere?