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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

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Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#21

Post by dhruvkar »

>>my goodness, it'd be slow and potentially flaky all via the web UI for those sites

Generally, I've had better luck using undocumented APIs for this kind of stuff. I was a heavy user of Selenium to automate many a task (I work in wholesale construction goods, tons of automations needed everywhere).

But then discovered that using internal APIs (which surprisingly don't change much) is far easier than trying to exception manage changing UIs.

Open up dev tools on your browser and watch the GETS/POSTS as you complete your daily tedium. I use Python (usually just requests and beautifulsoup is enough) to mimic the calls and I have yet to find a use case where I wasn't able to automate something online.

I'm currently developing an SDK for our 18th-century ERP system, which has no API. I've also automated getting shipping container tracking data from a various shipping lines and railroad company websites, many with complicated login processes.

Happy to chat, email in profile.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#22

Post by beamatronic »

iKlsR wrote: post #18

I 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…

What does this cost?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#23

Post by iKlsR »

muzani wrote: post #20
iKlsR wrote: post #18

I 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?

Some are are custom built from apis but I daresay you can find just about anything to hit a webhook or integrate into slack or elsewhere nowadays. Some examples are https://littlebirdie.io/ I use to filter hackernews, Zapier for RSS & filtering feeds, google calendar etc, nothing complicated, just know what you need from a specific service then figure out a way to get it to yourself in a recurring distraction free manner be it an existing addon or something you can roll yourself.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#24

Post by Cyph0n »

Ansible!

I’ve been working on a “mail to cloud storage” project on the side for fun, but also as an excuse to learn Rust.

As part of this effort, I decided to try out Ansible. Man, it is one great tool!

For development, I have all of my server “groups” pointing to the same host, so my Ansible playbooks install and setup everything on a single machine. Makes testing much easier tbh.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#25

Post by iKlsR »

beamatronic wrote: post #22
iKlsR wrote: post #18

I 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…

What does this cost?

Costs me nothing. Some channels eventually reach their lifetime usefulness like a topic I was interested in and amassed some 500+ mentions of it on twitter, business news from 8 months ago about someone getting acquired etc. I can export the messages and delete the channel to avoid history archival. Only real cost would be the one or two times a year maintenance and improving bits and pieces every now and then.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#26

Post by defterGoose »

I used to work at an architecture firm that specialized in design and manufacturing. One of our more popular products was facades made from aluminum panels with "graphic perforation", a pattern of holes made to form an image at a distance. As you can imagine, for larger projects the number of unique pieces to be cut was into the hundreds. This represented a lot of time for our CAM programmers because the (quite mature and industry standard) CAM software we used was incapable of determining the proper cut orientation without manual input. This meant clicking holes a bunch of times per panel to switch which side of the curve was cut. No Bueno.

One of our primary CAD suites was Rhino which is very nice and has a great python API. So I wrote a full-fledged 2.5D CAM processor for that. This allowed us to batch process hundreds of these parts with a single click.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#27

Post by simcop2387 »

I've started playing with some things with node-red + open hab to control my lights, but more in line with what you're talking about I've also played with Huginn for automating some small daily actions and webscraping. So far it's been going well but I'm not doing anything terribly difficult yet.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#28

Post by h4waii »

Take a look at Huginn [0], it's very powerful with the existing agents for taking input, parsing, and outputting data to different locations.

I use it mainly for when I can't do things in IFTTT or have sensitive things I'd prefer to keep in a self-hosted system.

0. https://github.com/huginn/huginn

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#29

Post by kryptn »

iKlsR wrote: post #18

I 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…

Oh cool, I didn't know if others were doing this. I've recently just started going down this path with some zero effort IFTTT triggers but I'm not happy with how infrequent they seem to trigger. My next step is to build my own set of listeners/scrapers.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#30

Post by pricci »

h4waii wrote: post #28

Take a look at Huginn [0], it's very powerful with the existing agents for taking input, parsing, and outputting data to different locations. I use it mainly for when I can't do things in IFTTT or have sensitive things I'd prefer to keep in a self-hosted system. 0. https://github.com/huginn/huginn

Now that you mention IFTTT. I've recently visited their website and found out it has a web hook "if". An http endpoint where you can GET/POST data and trigger actions on it.
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