Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities? • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by arafsheikh » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

slightwinder wrote: post #79

arafsheikh wrote: post #34

Last week I built an automated expense tracking dashboard on Tableau using SendGrid and Google Sheets. I use a Gmail filter to forward my credit card transaction emails to an Inbound Parser setup on SendGrid, which makes a POST call to my home server with the content of the email. A regex then captures the details from the POST body and pushes them to a Google Sheet. Next I use Tableau Public to read data from Google…

How does error-handling in this case happens? Do you get a message if some part of this pipeline fails?

Send grid retires sending the message for 3 days incase it doesn't get a 200 from my server.

To capture errors on my server I use PaperTrail's email alerts.

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

#102

Post by arafsheikh » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

j45 wrote: post #40

arafsheikh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tableau Public is the one that makes me uncomfortable. If this dashboard continues to work well and be useful I'll look into self-hosted alternatives.

Metabase may be of interest as an alternative

Yeah, I've used it in the past. Problem is my home server is a tiny RPi Zero and Metabase is too heavy for it. I'll look into running it on AWS/DO if I absolutely have to.

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

#103

Post by ctrl4 » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

dhruvkar wrote: post #21

>>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…

Yup. I did this with a local Android app, that tells you the gps location of a public bus. I sniffed the http packets, found the requests i needed and made a python script that pinged me at slack when my bus was 5 minutes from my bus stop. Useful when I worked at night.

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

#104

Post by hugs » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

jharohit wrote: post #77

lostintangent wrote: post #12

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.

Plugging another alternative to the horrible Selenium made by two friends of mine! https://uilicious.com/

Just here to let you know the Selenium developers are human and read HN, too.

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

#105

Post by faeyanpiraat » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

Be careful, my antivirus blocked the site when I visited the "Privacy" page from the top menu.

https://www.virusradar.com/en/HTML_ScrInject.B/description

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

#106

Post by Oldham-Made » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

I threw together a quick python script which scrapes listings from cinemas local to me, along with each movie's IMDB score, and compiles the results into a weekly Friday-morning email which I send to myself and my SO.

It's nice to know what movies are out, and when we can book, without having to remember to check or wait for pushy emails from the cinemas themselves.

I'm planning on doing the same to email us the latest menus from our favourite restaurants/cocktail bars so we can see when they change.

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

#107

Post by johnflan » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

jaggs wrote: post #76

A bit more basic, but I use two free desktop PC automation tools which I now can't do without. 1. TyperTask ( https://typertask.en.uptodown.com/windows ) to automate common tasks like adding different email signatures for different addresses etc etc. 2. ClipX ( http://bluemars.org/clipx/ ) for managing a huge clipboard history file. This saves me SO much time it's unbelievable.

It surprises me how many people don't use a clipboard manager. I use PasteBot on the Mac.

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

#108

Post by alexsexotic » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

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…

How does you not know if your slacking too long on YouTube? Do you use some chrome extension ?

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

#109

Post by leblancfg » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

patrickk wrote: post #61

JshWright wrote: post #5

I 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.

One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got t…

My brother prototyped this LED panel ages ago does that. Made for a good project, and it's still hanging in his office.

https://lbnc.ca/luz-lightbulb-meet-sunlight

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

#110

Post by rolandog » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

'make all' the things with (GNU)Makefile!

From pandoc pre-processing with a great tool called 'pp', to generating my CV in different languages and paper sizes, to ensuring my repositories have the latest .gitignore files.

I feel it requires a significant effort to setup, but once you're there, it eases your development flow and enhances reproducible outcomes, in my opinion.