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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?

#201

Post by cpclermont »

klohto wrote: post #179
cpclermont wrote: post #100

I have 141 custom scripts in my $HOME/bin. Most of it is in bash, but there's a couple of node.js scripts as well. - I mostly automate my bookkeeping with a set of recurring & dependent taskwarrior tasks and scripts as annotations that I run with taskopen[1]. That's creating a bunch of folders, turning some emails in mutt into PDFs, gathering PDFs from emails, fetching bills with selenium, moving files from $DOWNLOAD…

Would you be willing to share the code for Tempo automation? I am in market for the same thing.

Sure! It's in my dotfiles. You can find it here [1].

There's the `excel` subcommand you probably don't need and you'll need to export the JIRA_TEMPO_USER and JIRA_TEMPO_TOKEN variables before running it.

- `JIRA_TEMPO_TOKEN` can be found in the Tempo Settings

- `JIRA_TEMPO_USER` can be found by inspecting the requests sent to tempo from JIRA IIRC.

[1]: https://github.com/charlespwd/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/tempo

EDIT: Confirmed, I found my `JIRA_TEMPO_USER` as the only accountID sent as parameter the POST https://app.tempo.io/rest/tempo-timesheets/5/private/days/se... when booting up the app in JIRA.

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

#202

Post by xcubic »

ghaff wrote: post #166

In a somewhat similar vein to the OP, some of the details associated with publishing a new podcast can be rather manual and error-prone. This is especially annoying in the context of simple interview/discussion podcasts that don't really take all that much time to edit/post. A fairly simple Python script can automate the fiddly things like creating XML for a new podcast and uploading things to wherever you're hosting…

It looks like you could build a small SaaS around this...

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

#203

Post by tohs19 »

htk wrote: 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…

Also at an FO here, this is great. We started templating everything last year and it’s been a huge relief. Project management in Asana we also turned into templates, things are simple but flow so much easier.

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

#204

Post by soverance »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #187
derefr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A banking "statement" usually refers to a PDF you can download; the electronic version of the thing they'd previously send you by mail. The online banking CRUD interface might have up-to-date data, but it isn't an API, and being behind some weird proprietary single-sign-on setup makes it pretty hard to scrape, too. > Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ? Yes, this is common in the US (a…

> The online banking CRUD interface might have up-to-date data, but it isn't an API, and being behind some weird proprietary single-sign-on setup makes it pretty hard to scrape, too. That’a why they also provide an API. They are required by law to do so ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive ) > I don't think there's any bank in North America that requires 2FA to login to your online banking. This…

Bank of America only added 2FA as an opt-in option starting in 2017. It is most definitely not required... Law or not.

I'm pretty certain it's the same way with every other major US bank.

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

#205

Post by theshadowknows »

rumanator wrote: post #38
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.

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

Might check out Sikuli

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

#206

Post by ultrasounder »

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…

This is an excellent idea for an expense tracker dashboard. I would like to create something similar for a business process automation course that I am currently working on. And I would use Google Data Studio instead of tableau as Google sheets has a data connector for data studio already.

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

#207

Post by j45 »

arafsheikh wrote: post #102
j45 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve given in and bought an energy efficient homelab server for a few hundred off eBay. Intel makes the nuc, Lenovo has tiny thinkcentres, and HP has the elite desk among others.

The strange thing is how many odd lxc container projects I’ve stood up just to play with. Proxmox is sweet.

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

#208

Post by beatthatflight »

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…

(Facepalm)

I read your post.

Paused.

Opened up debugger on the site I'm currently selenium-ising.

reloaded.

boom. there it is. The request, and beautiful json response.

So...so..so much simpler.

Thank you, my evening is sorted ;)

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

#209

Post by xzel »

lostintangent wrote: post #150
xzel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As part of our goal to enable better developer ergonomics, we’re very keen to explore “better”/higher-level APIs and additional extensibility points. For example, we allow you to define custom “selector engines” ( https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/master/docs/sel... ), which is just one example of the kinds of customizations we want to enable. Out of curiosity: are there any specific extensions from puppet…

Looks great. The ones I use the most are probably: puppeteer-extra-plugin-block-resources puppeteer-extra-plugin-anonymize-ua puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth (this the most heavily)

Cheers!

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