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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?

#111
post #80

I manage a Family Office and do monthly performance presentations with PowerPoint, the slides have an unique design, and updating them every month became extremely tedious and error prone. I was already looking for an excuse to learn Python and this was perfect. Instead of recreating the slides I created templates (just the last set of presentations) and update them with info directly queried from the database, using…

Nice! I work at a quant fund and we Python-pptx, too.

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

#112
post #94
post #80

I manage a Family Office and do monthly performance presentations with PowerPoint, the slides have an unique design, and updating them every month became extremely tedious and error prone. I was already looking for an excuse to learn Python and this was perfect. Instead of recreating the slides I created templates (just the last set of presentations) and update them with info directly queried from the database, using…

Check out revealjs.com

Reveal is good but very hard to recreate ppt slides.

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

#114

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/

Doesn't seem open source?

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

#115
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 ?

Rescuetime, https://help.rescuetime.com/article/44-how-to-set-goals-in-r...

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

#116
Hey, I recommend you RPA (Robotics Process Automation), there some open source option such as Open RPA or community options as UiPath. Actually I work as an RPA developer and you can automate whatever you want. For example read an email, capture that information in an Excel and fill web forms based on the excel.

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

#117
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I posted the same thing on a similar thread yesterday but if you're looking to build some scrapers and listeners and make it easy for yourself I'd highly recommend Huginn ( https://github.com/huginn/huginn ). I set it up a few months back and I've been using it to scrape all sorts of info and alert me on things. IE: * A change in GBP -> NOK exchange rate, to indicate if it's a good time to buy ready for my next trip…

I found this last night and I'm already looking at replacing/extending my existing setup with it. Thanks for the share!

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

#118
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the better question is how long did it take you to set this up initially?

Right, I started with RSS initially. It wasn't in one go, it was over a period. If I had to give you a definitive answer however, I haven't spent more than a couple hours total on this and I've been using this close to 2 years now. Did a recap last night and I have a total of 17 bots, some post daily, others I see once a month. I'm also seeing tools being shared here that could make this a lot easier as well such as huginn.

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

#119
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait isn’t having a bot send you notifications all day the opposite of “distraction free”?

Not OP, but I think that the idea is that if a notification makes it through the system, it has been filtered to be worthy of distraction. So, there isn't a cognitive cost to the user of "is the notification worth reading" since it has already been determined to be that way.

You're right. On average I probably get about a dozen spaced out during my working hours, 10am to 4pm. On a busy day I might get a couple dozen but the intervals make these easily manageable and I always have priority. If I see something from Gilfoyle in alerts that's probably more pressing than a company I'm following that just released unaudited financials in news. Setup might sound odd but in reality as said above anything that makes it through has some stake in something I'm invested in and want to keep an eye on.
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