We use Jenkins to run .bat files that package our video game, upload to Steam and spool up Gamelift matchmaking servers on AWS every night. Before this I did it by hand, now I wonder how I could ever have operated with that inefficiency!
Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
141–150 of 234 posts
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder who else is refreshing the class registration page and filling it up within 30 minutes? Or do the special people get advance notice that registration is about to open? I remember reading a wild tale of how someone made a program for a used car salesman that would check a particular car auction site to make sure they get a good deal (I wish I could remember the details, or better yet, find the URL)
You're looking for "Defcon 21 - How my Botnet Purchased Millions of Dollars in Cars and Defeated the Russian Hackers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgz5dutPF8M
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#143Playwright 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.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#144Playwright 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
To make the act of selecting elements more resilient to change, Playwright also supports a collection of “selector engines” that allow you to choose the best strategy for selecting elements (via CSS selector, xpath, text content). Additionally, you can author entirely custom selector engines, and compose them together with the built-in types. This is still somewhat experimental, but we think this can enable another level of robustness to test automation: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/master/docs/sel....
Finally, in addition to waiting for element visibility, Playwright allows you to wait for specific page events to occur (e.g. network request work made). This enables your code to leverage deterministic “signals”, not timeouts (which are the source of a lot of flakiness!). Overall, we want it to be possible to author automation that is entirely event-driven, and includes zero arbitrary timeouts.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds a lot more complicated than just downloading bank statements and uploading them to YNAB and adds a lot more points of failure
It does, but it also keeps YNAB more in sync with your bank account, since transactions will typically take a couple days to show up in the statement.
Wait, in what century do you live that your online banking transaction overview doesn't have up to date data ? Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ?
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#146auto delete certain messages from gmail after 30 days . i use filters to tag messages as "autodelete" and create a google script that runs periodically to delete them . It shouldn't be so hard to do something so simple.
I'm fairly certain this is how the "trash" in gmail works by default. Anything that gets sent to there stays there for 30 days then is automatically deleted.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#147Playwright 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.
Love the project, just installed it and trying it out now, got some nice results right away.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#148Playwright 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.
Hi thanks for mentioning your project. Are there any plans to use it for automated UI testing for desktop apps? Selenium supports it (more or less) with WinAppDriver, which is another project from Microsoft. https://github.com/microsoft/WinAppDriver
As we build out Playwright, we hope to learn a lot about how to make automation more reliable, ergonomic, and enjoyable for developers. Ideally, we could then apply those principles/learnings to desktop, mobile, etc. automation too. Stay tuned!
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#149Playwright 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.
Thanks for the heads up! Selenium tests flakiness is definitely a big pain for us. I am also a big fan of the puppeteer api. We will check it out.
Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?
#150Playwright 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.
Ah this looks great. I'm super happy I'm learning about this project. Do you guys have any plans of adding extensions ala puppeteer-extra?
Out of curiosity: are there any specific extensions from puppeteer-extra that you’ve used and/or would be interested to see?