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My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools

tines.com

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Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools

#11

Post by nefitty »

I have had a lot of fun and success with Keyboard Maestro for Mac and Shortcuts for iOS. For my work, I try to automate Terminal commands. I also dabbled a little with bash scripts. I love that Shortcuts lets me think programatically and flex those muscles for fun tasks.

Here's some stuff I have set up:

Mac:

- I use several displays, and don't usually use the built-in monitor. I have an automation that dims it until it turns off.

- I have recurring KM script that deletes Yarn and NPM caches. They get huuuuge.

- I have a bash script that shows me the temperature of my Mac. I might be able to add an alert if the temp goes above x.

iOS:

- I hooked up my Pavlok shock bracelet to Reminders. I get a percentage chance of getting shocked every 15mins if tasks aren't done. The more tasks done, the less likely it is.

- Shortcut to pull up Youtube videos for PiP without a Youtube Premium account. You can find that online. Game changer.

- Sci-Hub and Meta.org search shortcuts made available in the share menu. You can get my Sci-Hub shortcut here (a good starting point for other search shortcuts): https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub-mirrors

- To help me debug shortcuts, I created a logger that writes to Data Jar or to a Note. Helps soo much. I haven't released it but you can get my Twitter at the link above if you're interested.

Node dev:

- Semantic commit template accessible through Dash's text-expander

- Next.js sucks but I made some scripts to automate that work. I had to use a Chrome-watcher that let's me refresh specific tabs from the command line.

There's many more. I wanted to share mine to maybe give you an idea of what tools to check out and what to automate to approximate your robotic luxury communist future.

Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools

#13

Post by _pdp_ »

I feel that all workflow tools are simply lacking in terms of capabilities. Sure, the base-cases are covered but when it comes to something remotely useful it is best to be implemented with real code. That being said, I think there is certainly a need for some low-code tools where your requirement is simply basic automation and service plumbing, as long as it is not mission critical, i.e. take value from system A and put in system B.

For example, do you really want to implement the entire Slack interactive callback workflow for displaying a simple dialog to a user? I guess not. I workflow will do a much better job at that sort of problems.

That being all said, I don't think tines does a particularly good job at this because it simply chains a number of HTTP requests. Some of these APIs require special care and HTTP simply does not cut it.

Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools

#14

Post by tediousdemise »

These comments all present valid reasons why low-code is usually a nightmare. To me, the most egregious offender is vendor lock-in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in.

It's all fine and dandy if you found a low-code solution that works for you, as long as you're comfortable paying a premium to pigeon hole yourself with that solution for the unforeseeable future, with no guarantees that you won't get royally screwed by some combination of planned obsolescence, feature deprecation, or the success of the company whose low-code product you are using.

Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools

#15

Post by Ma8ee »

nyx wrote: post #3

This 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…

And that basic pattern is usually called Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) and there are numerous implementations. Some respectable Open Source ones too.

Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools

#16

Post by _pdp_ »

tediousdemise wrote: post #14

These comments all present valid reasons why low-code is usually a nightmare. To me, the most egregious offender is vendor lock-in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in . It's all fine and dandy if you found a low-code solution that works for you, as long as you're comfortable paying a premium to pigeon hole yourself with that solution for the unforeseeable future, with no guarantees that you won't get royall…

Vendor lock-in is not always a problem. Imagine that you have a situation where you can either throw one engineer at it to create a custom solution or buy an existing one that locks you into their service offering? What would you choose? It is not always clear-cut, but it is better to buy simply because employees are not permanent in most cases. After they leave, there will be zero support.

Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools

#17

Post by jhot »

bikingbismuth wrote: post #7

I 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.

I used to consult in the document capture space (OCR, classification, data extraction) and one company I worked for wanted to sell UiPath. I showed them how I could do all of that in code (even built a wrapper around AutoHotkey for Windows UI interaction) with way less time, effort, and hair pulling. They said it wouldn't sell because businesses think they can have someone implement a low code solution and they'll take it over eventually, and a significant portion of their revenue is from licenses.

I luckily no longer consult and now am an automation engineer for a company and I get to build things the way I want. So far a lot of Go and a little bit of Node and things are great. I'll take that any day over "We sell X, so you use X for everything."

That said, for home automation I do use Node Red and absolutely love it. The integration with Home Assistant is top notch and prototypes and tweaks take no time at all. It's much more like functional programming than a lot of low code tools and the function node allows for whatever JS you want. So if I need to do something complicated that would take a ton of individual nodes and spaghetti to work natively, I can just drop in some code and move on.

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