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

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41–50 of 234 posts

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

#41
I use a collection of tools from this repo to automate mundane developer activities such as posting release notes slack messages containing linked pivotal or Jira story titles: https://github.com/sufyanadam/pivotoolz

There's a bunch of stuff in there that saves you seconds each time you have to work with a user story or cut a branch or merge etc... Saved me a bunch of time over the years!

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

#43
Have you tried https://pipedream.com? You can run Node.js (with any npm package) on webhook/http requests, emails and schedules for free. It also manages auth (including oauth token generation and refresh) for popular apps like Google Sheets, Discord, Slack and Airtable -- just use the auths object to reference tokens and keys in code.

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

#44
post #43

Have you tried https://pipedream.com ? You can run Node.js (with any npm package) on webhook/http requests, emails and schedules for free. It also manages auth (including oauth token generation and refresh) for popular apps like Google Sheets, Discord, Slack and Airtable -- just use the auths object to reference tokens and keys in code.

Looks very promising! However the pricing is opaque. What will this cost me, if my business becomes successful and hit their free tier rate limits?

https://docs.pipedream.com/pricing/

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

#45
Make is an incredibly powerful tool for managing any automated process, not just software compilation. It doesn’t know how to do any of the individual steps itself, of course, but it lets you break down a process into indivdual small pieces that can be automated separately.

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

#46

Playwright 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.

Keen to check it out; the flakiness of Webdriver/Selenium I often wonder is more pain than it brings. So many sites I see disabling tests based on it because they sometimes work/sometimes don't, the hours that get plowed into it.

Edit: Missed the Microsoft ref. Not so keen.

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

#47
Probably off initial topic, but:

- FileJuggler on Windows, to automatically clean Desktop, Download folder and archive everything into a date-based folder structure in Drive.

- AutoHotKey to insert text templates into everything (e.g. current date, formatted Jira issues, annoying things to type)

The problem with automation is that one will want to break even quickly [time saved > (time spent finding/setting/maintaining)] otherwise automation is just a glorified delayed action. Time saving is not the only reason for automating but I assume it's n°1's when it comes to personal use.

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

#48

Playwright 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.

Looks promising ! although most of my problems (but not all) were related to environment and not Selenium itself.

> setTimeout-free automation

How ? you still need an upper limit for operations

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

#49

Autohotkey 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.

It is much easier to do those actions with Python ( https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/chapter20/ )

I would say autohotkey is far superior to python on windows. The runtime comes with everything you need, no need to install/manage external dependencies. For example, I copy-pasted a 324 line snippet from the forums (https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/16400-ahk-regex-tester-v2...) into an .ahk file and I immediately get a full GUI to test my regexes on, 13 years after the snippet was posted.

Additionally you can bundle the interpreter for your scripts into a standalone .exe that can run on anybody's windows machine without needing ahk installed. It's a one-click operation done in a program that was also written in autohotkey (https://github.com/AutoHotkey/Ahk2Exe). I can't imagine anything as resilient as AHK when it comes to scripting automation programs on windows.

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

#50

>>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 except…

Good point, using the APIs directly is the also the corner stone of stable test automation
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