Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

Sorting my mails with imapfilter. I have a yaml file where I write down which mails go into which folder depending on sender or recipient or another header field. Runs on a raspberry pi every ten minutes between 8 and 8.

I take enormous pleasure in automating every part of my research pipelines (comp sci).

As in, I like to get my experiment setup (usually distributed and many different components interacting with each other) to a point where one command resets all components, starts them in screen processes on all of the machines with the appropriate timing and setup commands, runs the experiment(s), moves the results between machines, generates intermediate results and exports publication ready plots to the right folder.

Upside: once it's ready, iterating on the research part of the experiment is great. No need to focus on anything else any more, just the actual research problem, not a single unnecessary click to start something (even 2 clicks become irritating when you do them hundreds of times). Need another ablation study/explore another parameter/idea? Just change a flag/line/function, kick off once, and have the plots the next day. No fiddling around.

Downside: full orchestration takes very long initially, but a bit into my research career I now have tons of utilities for all of this. It also has made me much better at command line and general setup nonsense.

I liked writing an internal command line utility for our Go codebase. It automates common dev commands like deployments (including installing dependencies, migrations, etc), sending test emails (eg to check formatting), and running smoke tests. Pretty minor, but it makes my life a lot easier. I plan on expanding it more for accessing prod and dev APIs.

What does that do for you? For me, mails have three states:

1. Need action right now. I answer them and archive.

2. Need action later. I open a TODO and archive. If I need them later, I can search for them.

3. Do not need action. These are already archived. I can search through them, if I need anything.

If I have to update a file programmatically when I make certain modifications to a codebase I'll write a script that automates the update.