The whole nature of coding is that is essentially motivationally self-taught. As for automation- that’s what better coders do. Perhaps this is being confused with “Find a good problem that motivates you, and fight a knock-down, drag-out battle to solve it.”
Learning to code vs. learning to automate
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Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#12https://www.autoitscript.com/site/
That's still coding.
The intent here is to build on a better, Excel-user-accessible set of abstractions.
Which generally means:
1) Graphical IDE
2) Automation activities which map directly to their existing manual activities
3) High-level support for highly-used application-specific activities
Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#13Any recommendations on a good MacOS GUI automation tool that isnt Automator? Seems like the windows automation ecosystem has several options, but I’m struggling to find a good Mac solution that’s capable of automating desktop apps with fine-grained workflows
I used Hammerspoon a few times to automate some mining and building in Terraria (keystrokes, mouse movement and clicks).
Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#14Any recommendations on a good MacOS GUI automation tool that isnt Automator? Seems like the windows automation ecosystem has several options, but I’m struggling to find a good Mac solution that’s capable of automating desktop apps with fine-grained workflows
Keyboard Maestro is my go-to tool. It's incredibly powerful and I've automated so many things in so many applications that I really don't even know if I could use a computer without it anymore. https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/
Thanks for this tip.
Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#15The whole nature of coding is that is essentially motivationally self-taught. As for automation- that’s what better coders do. Perhaps this is being confused with “Find a good problem that motivates you, and fight a knock-down, drag-out battle to solve it.”
Programmers drastically underestimate the amount of poor abstractions we've created.
There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming in order to be able to do 4 actions across 2 apps.
Fundamentally, that's what this article was getting at for me.
Should we (a) encourage more people to learn to code (in existing languages / frameworks), so that they might use coding to automate their own work, or (b) identify simplified systems that require less knowledge, but are sufficient for the automation tasks being asked of them.
I love learning about multi-level cache heirarchies and performance effects thereof.
But I would rather my company's accountants instead know the accounting-equivalent of that bit of trivia, and yet gain the benefit of being able to write simple automation on their computers.
Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#16Just brought print version of https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ (2nd edition just released) - thought it would be a good way to learn some code in a practical interesting setting of automation
Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#17Somewhat related, tools like Quickbase, Google Appmaker, Knack, Zoho Creator all work pretty well with non tech folks. Especially in areas like Finance, where they are already familiar with pushing Excel pretty hard. Gets rid of a lot of manual emailing spreadsheets around and tedious data collection.
Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#18Any recommendations on a good MacOS GUI automation tool that isnt Automator? Seems like the windows automation ecosystem has several options, but I’m struggling to find a good Mac solution that’s capable of automating desktop apps with fine-grained workflows
Semi off topic: Workflow (Shortcuts) for iOS is great and it is semi ported to the Mac via Catalyst libraries (https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/11810213462240583...). Hopefully, Apple actually goes whole hog and ports WorkFlow to the Mac next year.
Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#19To paraphrase a famous quote on regular expressions: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll automate.' Now they have two problems."
What would you prefer? Manual is hardly an option.
Forest, trees...
There are problems one should automate but there are many problems where automating is not worth the effort.
Re: Learning to code vs. learning to automate
#20> “avoid thinking of writing code as the goal and learn to solve problems.”
Hasn't this been done to death now? Are there still developers out there whose primary focus is writing code rathet than solving problems?