My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by celdon25 » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 1:53 AM UTC

I actually had to use this about a year ago to build a SOAR system at a Fortune 500 company. The Tines team was pretty responsive to questions and requests for help, and they even sent me a nice box of swag. The box arrived after I resigned from that job, however.

No matter how many niceties you put on flow-based programming, the tools I had to use (all serverless) were the wrong ones for the job, and management was unreceptive to feedback (they wouldn't even give me a github repository).

I think Tines has potential but it's going to have to invest more into mitigating its shortcomings, not just further improvements on what it already does well. For example, as of March 2021, it was still far too easy to misclick and break something in production with no confirmation. You could export your setup as json, but IMO there was too much friction/manual work with that approach for it to be useful. To be fair, the company was pretty early stage at the time, maybe it's improved since then.

I don't blame Tines for what was the worst job I ever had (which I still have nightmares about to this day), but maybe someone else can be avoided the same fate with this feedback.

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

#52

Post by agundy » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:07 AM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #48

I once worked with a software stack called ActiveBatch. I really wish there was something as easy to set up as ActiveBatch available for the consumer market. Even something like Apache Airflow isn't competitive in terms of ease of setup. Activebatch is literally just install the scheduler on a Windows system, connect a SQL Server DB(use community edition) and then install the "execution agent" on whatever machine you…

Maybe Huggin can do some of what you are interested in? https://github.com/huginn/huginn It also sounds sort of similar to Node red though that is primarily based around iot and api processing and routing.

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

#53

Post by anakaine » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:21 AM UTC

mromanuk wrote: post #22

I read it happily waiting for the aha moment until the very end, where I realized that it was just an adpost for a new ifttt/transform tool with a glaze of "low code is the future" (All that for just $30k/year)

What a complete turd of a post. Gaming the audience to get sales leads.

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

#54

Post by go_prodev » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

So it's like powerautomate, but without the power suite.

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

#55

Post by CleverLikeAnOx » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 3:08 AM UTC

mercwear wrote: post #9

From 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 t…

I know the founders of Tines, so I can confidently say that it wasn't dreamed up by a VC. The founders both come from an infosec background. They basically left their jobs to build the product they wished existed.

They were quite good at security operations. That probably made it easier to gain initial traction because they understand their target niche's problems.

I won't upvote this article because it's content marketing spam, but I respect the hustle and hope that it works for them!

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

#56

Post by el_zako » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 3:10 AM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #48

I once worked with a software stack called ActiveBatch. I really wish there was something as easy to set up as ActiveBatch available for the consumer market. Even something like Apache Airflow isn't competitive in terms of ease of setup. Activebatch is literally just install the scheduler on a Windows system, connect a SQL Server DB(use community edition) and then install the "execution agent" on whatever machine you…

Apache NiFi does exactly what you described.

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

#57

Post by Terretta » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 3:50 AM UTC

jtbayly wrote: post #45

Havoc wrote: post #44

The very last thing I want out of my automation tools is SaaS. Not even if it’s free. Ansible, bash, python etc. stuff I can control, self host and move around at will. Even selfhosted gitlab ci makes me wary Tired of getting held hostage by all these crappy SaaS that start of ok and then squeeze

At least for $30,000 per year you know they are also taking you for a ride, not just locking you in. I’d personally rather hire an assistant than pay $3,000 per year to have my lights turn off when I’m on a call. Can you even imagine putting a price of $3000 per automation on a glorified IFTT? It doesn’t matter how much better it is.

Yes if it saves you paying cybersec salary for a watch, cut, and paste alert jockey.

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

#58

Post by iJohnDoe » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 5:05 AM UTC

I have a tab delimited file that I bring into Excel. I need to review it on it a regular basis for cybersecurity reasons.

I load the file into Excel and then use the Excel Filters feature to get pulldown menus for each column. I then review the columns and filter for ports, user-agents, IPs, etc. Pretty typical stuff.

Anyone know how to automate the above that would basically just spit out files based on how I’m manually doing the filters? Then I can just open a file that is grouped by user-agents or open a file grouped by ports.

Thanks.

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

#59

Post by nebula8804 » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 5:39 AM UTC

el_zako wrote: post #56

nebula8804 wrote: post #48

I once worked with a software stack called ActiveBatch. I really wish there was something as easy to set up as ActiveBatch available for the consumer market. Even something like Apache Airflow isn't competitive in terms of ease of setup. Activebatch is literally just install the scheduler on a Windows system, connect a SQL Server DB(use community edition) and then install the "execution agent" on whatever machine you…

Apache NiFi does exactly what you described.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out. Looks like it has a simple installer for Windows which is great but lacks a DB backend to store all job data and to operate the scheduler.

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

#60

Post by nebula8804 » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 5:39 AM UTC

agundy wrote: post #52

nebula8804 wrote: post #48

I once worked with a software stack called ActiveBatch. I really wish there was something as easy to set up as ActiveBatch available for the consumer market. Even something like Apache Airflow isn't competitive in terms of ease of setup. Activebatch is literally just install the scheduler on a Windows system, connect a SQL Server DB(use community edition) and then install the "execution agent" on whatever machine you…

Maybe Huggin can do some of what you are interested in? https://github.com/huginn/huginn It also sounds sort of similar to Node red though that is primarily based around iot and api processing and routing.

Thanks! I'll take a look.