
Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be? - qrt
Hello HN!<p>We&#x27;re currently working on a work automation platform. We have a few capabilities that we&#x27;re building to help you do your work better. For guidance it would be super helpful to hear directly from the HN crowd :)<p>Please do comment below about one thing you&#x27;d like to see automated. Would super awesome if you could complete this quick 1-min survey: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2MjN6fd<p>Many thanks!
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sheeeep86
It's not fully automate, but I frequently find myself having to do a lot of
one off shell tasks, which are not quite worth the effort of writing a bash
script. While some command is running I would like to start enqueing the next
command.

Technically I could write one command like this and go get a coffee:

cd dir1 && task1 && cd ../dir2 && task2 some arg && etc

But then the task would only start executing when I'm done typing all
commands... I want it to start task1 right away and then tkae my time to enter
the rest...

~~~
parliament32
Might be worth it for you to just get better at bash. Use background jobs and
"wait":

    
    
        do.sh stuff &
        wait; do-other-stuff.sh -123 &
        wait; cd ../; do-something-else.sh
    

It'll run the first command, when it's done it'll move on to the next one,
etc. Use "jobs" to see jobs. Further reading:
[https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x9644.html](https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x9644.html)

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lowdose
Acquiring knowledge. Auto flash card question generation based on the things I
read, listen and watch.

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arsenide
We have many software programs that need to be run in sequence to transform a
set of data from one form (on the order of tens to hundreds of GB) into a
bunch of different output file formats. At some points the tools need to be
run linearly, and at other points there are a few tools that need to be run in
a branched fashion and then their outputs are combined in some complicated way
using the next tool. Some of these tools take on the order of up to days to
run, so an improper configuration due to human error loses time (pretty common
given the complexity of work). Often the time lost is on the order of days.

These tools need to be configured in certain ways depending on the business
needs.

Having a nice way to look at the dataflow as a whole, configure these tools on
a global level within some framework, and be able to nicely distribute the
work on our internal server farm would be worth a good bit of money to the
company.

~~~
mickeyp
This is a common problem and for one you'll find many different solutions.

I used Apache Airflow some years ago to do exactly this. It's pretty good. You
build a workflow of tasks (in Python) and set a schedule of how often you want
it run. It then runs these tasks on any number of machines that you run the
Airflow worker on to orchestrate the running of whatever it is you are trying
to do.

If a task fails it can notify you; and if you "miss" a run it can backfill it
provided your toolchain understands the concept of time. Very useful for
hourly/daily feeds that, if you miss one, the system can go back and retry it
just for the slots it missed.

Comes with a nice UI, too.

~~~
arsenide
I’m glancing at the documentation, and came across this line:

“Airflow is not a data streaming solution. Tasks do not move data from one to
the other (though tasks can exchange metadata!)“

Many of our tools take on the order of 5-200gb of data and do either some
transformation (which gets passed along to the next tool; similar size,
possibly after another automated validation step) and/or validation (whereby
this particular branch of workflow ceases).

The automated modules we have are self-contained; each task in our case is
“data + config parameters in, data out”, then use “data out” as “data in”
after choosing configuration parameters for the next step.

Would this still be a good usecase — am I misunderstanding what the above
quote is about?

~~~
mickeyp
Airflow does not do the work itself; you write stuff in Python, so you _could_
make it do it, but it would be the wrong way forward for large volumes of data
if time is of the essence. It merely calls out to stuff that does --- such as
other tools that do the processing, and so forth.

One example is perhaps a small python script (run by airflow) to pull the
files you need to process; pass them to in a downstream task that runs a shell
script; which takes its output and in turn does something else entirely.

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quickthrower2
Refactoring. I’m sure there could be more advanced refactoring available than
rename and extract method.

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protoweek
Figure out all the things I need to read and summarise it for me... tab
switching, reading, skimming take up a lot of my time

Many channels on slack + email threads + conversations on DMs

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opportune
heres a potentially easy one: create a tool that behaves exactly like outlook
rules to the user but can be applied to gmail

I spend too much time looking at email and can’t seem to get the hang of the
gmail labels system

~~~
davchana
A possible solution is: coarsely label the incoming mail, or just label
everything incoming if coarse label is not possible.

In Google Apps Script, fetch all mail with that label, process as wanted, like
sending replies, moving, deleting; & then remove the label.

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pks016
Not related to software.

I have to feed and give fresh & vitamin water to birds almost everyday. I
wish, I could automate that somehow.

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powerbottle
Does code review and keeping up with code reviews count? I find that I can
review PRs from multiple teams in a day and keeping up with them all of them
is a lot of effort

If there was a bot that kept up with my work and just summarised all the
progress since my reviews ... that would really be super useful and I’d likely
do more reviews

~~~
robbya
I believe GitHub will show a changes since last review view after you review
code, new changes are added, and then you return. What software are you using?

~~~
Noumenon72
Looks like Bitbucket Server got this in version 4.11. I gotta ask my work to
upgrade! [https://www.atlassian.com/blog/bitbucket/new-features-
bitbuc...](https://www.atlassian.com/blog/bitbucket/new-features-
bitbucket-4-11)

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axaxs
Finding something to join meetings in my place, and record anything I was
needed for, if anything.

~~~
Roybot
Which video conferencing software do you use?

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markus_zhang
I'd like to build a robot to check if a colleague is sitting at his desk or
not.

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pitcher
Repeated tasks, low structure but high effort:

\- Finding files that are relevant to my work

\- Meetings / stand ups

\- Creating status reports and communicating progress with work

I often find that tasks I do repeatedly is often not automatable due to high
contextual information that is required to do so

~~~
byoung2
_Meetings / stand ups_

We have recently automated stand ups, so the what I did yesterday/what I will
do today/blockers are all pulled from Jira so now we only discuss major sprint
goals and how to unblock any blockers...this reduces the meeting to just the
important stuff

~~~
pitcher
nice

Does this mean keeping all status up to date in Jira? would you mind sharing
how you do this?

~~~
smt88
> _would you mind sharing how you do this?_

Not GP and not my personal experience, but I have a friend whose company has a
non-developer do this as part of their full-time responsibilities. They
privately check in with every developer at the end of every day.

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sellingwebsite
you will find numerous examples of what can be automated on this thread
[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ebp6ak/there_is_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ebp6ak/there_is_a_well_known_saying_that_goes_always/)

~~~
Noumenon72
This is mostly a thread of things computer-illiterate people don't realize can
be automated, like selecting multiple rows before copying. I think Hacker News
is at another level.

