My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
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Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#2This was a pretty interesting adicle until the sales started in earnest. Tines looks mildly interesting, but it's wildly expensive and the community edition isn't available on-premises, so it's a hard pass from me. Plus, I'm immediately skeptical of any company that crows about anything Gartner-related.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#3This article is a lengthy preamble to an advertisement for a SaaS product, but I'm thankful you at least get to a conclusion before the evangelism begins: there's a basic pattern here, i.e. "get data from X, transform it, and put it in Y", and the tools, systems, and platforms listed are all solutions to the same basic problem.
I'm sure there's a use case and a market for this product, but I'd wager that I'm not alone among the HN audience in thinking that I'd rather have a couple shell scripts in a Docker container on my own hardware or whatever than spend a bunch of money irreversibly trapping my automations in some proprietary cloud-hosted thing where they can be held ransom come the renewal date.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#4This article is a lengthy preamble to an advertisement for a SaaS product, but I'm thankful you at least get to a conclusion before the evangelism begins: there's a basic pattern here, i.e. "get data from X, transform it, and put it in Y", and the tools, systems, and platforms listed are all solutions to the same basic problem. I'm sure there's a use case and a market for this product, but I'd wager that I'm not alon…
I think there's space for an open source library that can help with what you described by using just python and YAML. We originally created https://github.com/typhoon-data-org/typhoon-orchestrator to orchestrate ETL workflows, which would be a superset of the use cases you described. Our next goal is to allow deployment to AWS lambda which can be a good compromise between getting locked in with SAAS and hosting your own infrastructure.
Also check out Zappa's scheduled tasks that have a similar goal and inspired our library. We used it initially as a backbone and ran into a series of issues that forced us to write our own version of it, but depending on your goals it could be enough.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#5This was a pretty interesting adicle until the sales started in earnest. Tines looks mildly interesting, but it's wildly expensive and the community edition isn't available on-premises, so it's a hard pass from me. Plus, I'm immediately skeptical of any company that crows about anything Gartner-related.
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Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#6This article is a lengthy preamble to an advertisement for a SaaS product, but I'm thankful you at least get to a conclusion before the evangelism begins: there's a basic pattern here, i.e. "get data from X, transform it, and put it in Y", and the tools, systems, and platforms listed are all solutions to the same basic problem. I'm sure there's a use case and a market for this product, but I'd wager that I'm not alon…
What saves me the most time is not "automation" but something I call "Don't waste time learning things that are likely to go away".
So yeah, I'll just leverage the skills I've leveraged over and over to make a living.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#7I once had to implement SOAR in a “no code” automation solution (it was not Tines), and it was terrible. There were a lot of connectors and transformers, but almost all of them had some weird quirks that made them hard to use effectively. Coming from an “all code” background I was pulling my hair out trying to troubleshoot everything. The project was sufficiently onerous that I actually left my job over it.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#8This article is a lengthy preamble to an advertisement for a SaaS product, but I'm thankful you at least get to a conclusion before the evangelism begins: there's a basic pattern here, i.e. "get data from X, transform it, and put it in Y", and the tools, systems, and platforms listed are all solutions to the same basic problem. I'm sure there's a use case and a market for this product, but I'd wager that I'm not alon…
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Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#9From the outside looking in Tines looks to be a less feature rich and much more expensive version of Zapier (almost like a VC had the idea of building a Zapier clone and slapping a ridiculous price on it along with some "security" verbiage to spur the interest of larger businesses who see a $99/mo product and instantly believe it's not enterprise ready).
I do not see a way to automate most of my side projects given the free plan limitations and for an individual the pricing is a non-starter.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#10Here is a related story. I should mention Tines or OP has no relationship I know of with Salesforce, for background Mulesolft is a cloud focused integration platform owned by Salesforce, who's big feature is visual mapping, visual workflows, etc. (of course it is more complex than this, read up if you are interested):
I attended another meetup/training, Mulesoft was really pushing their web only visual workflow/mapping tool. And the instructor goes over the entire song and dance, and I said to him, that I was having real difficulty even understanding what type of problem this tool would be good for in a real-world situation. And he takes his glasses off and says to a room full of maybe 30 or 40 developers, that this tool they had been pushing so hard should NEVER be used in production, its only real use was for sale demos and maybe, maybe, doing some sort of POC which would need to be reproduced in 'code' at a later time. He used weasel words to say all of this of course, but his meaning was clear. This was 2018~2019, not the stone ages. So, I wasted that evening (there would be more) going to a sales enablement seminar billing itself a developer learning workshop.