I spend a lot of time with web automation
Especially for public library catalogues. There the webpage shows when the borrowed books are due, and you need to check it every week, or pay late fees. And you cannot set a bookmark, since you need to login first, which is tedious. So I automated it to renew all books and show me a warning.
And because that needs to run silently everyday, I decided to make it as fast as possible (and because I only had a single core cpu with less than 1gb ram). No browser, no javascript, no selenium, no python, no java. Only viable languages would be C or Pascal, and for memory safety I implemented everything in Pascal.
Because it is also tedious to build HTTP requests in native code and recompile it all the time, I then wrote a scripting language for it, all the webscraping is done in the script, but it is still fast because the processing is done in native code.
To read data from the HTML, I use pattern matching, e.g. + would read all links, and foo+ would read all links with text foo.
Nowadays I do not even visit public libraries anymore, but the automation tool has become an open-source project at http://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html .
I also started playing some browser games, but they are boring, so I stopped. But I want to stay in the highscore list, so I wrotes bot for them. Because they have anti cheat detections, you cannot send the http requests directly. For javascript based games, I wrote a bot with Greasemonkey. For flash games that does not work, so I have decompiled the flash file, added the automation functions to the flash, and then recompiled it.