
Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work? - zihua
Hey guys: I’m starting to realize that a sizable chunk of my work is actually quite repetitive. For instance, I’d have to log into GCloud console every once in a while to check if I still have enough credits… Do you guys have these repetitive tasks at work? I’m thinking of using coding up some automation scripts and I’d love to see where else people might use it on!<p>PS: what kind of jobs do you guys do? I’m a software engineer at a small startup
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digitalsushi
I work at a fortune 100 insurance company in a dedicated IT subdivision of the
company.

Fairly quickly, one might find that all requests are repetitive. It can be
quite productive, professionally, to just assume that whatever you're asked to
do, will be asked for again, and to learn how to pre-empt those requests by
writing the first solution directly as automation code.

It doesn't have to be rocket science. Just keeping all the interesting bits in
variables is the first 50% of automation.

You can become known as a miracle worker fairly quickly by just keeping a
"commonplace book" of old one-off scripts, quickly found, in a personal git
repo. Keep the company secrets left out to protect your skin, but a manager is
often very quick to notice the person who can almost instantly replicate a
previous request.

Having those snippets available also cross-pollinates - how many times have
you repurposed one script into another? Careful now, once in a great while
those turn into money making products, especially when the unrelated ones are
hooked together.

These days, my little snippets are largely the boring, gross parts that act as
the heavy barriers to automation - learning the URL endpoints for automation,
learning the automation types, just getting a session that can do work. From
there, the base case often yields a full strategy with another 10% of the work
- modern APIs are so good you can generally just guess what is required and
half the time it works without reading the docs.

Try coding it up. Worst case, you learn, best case, you invent a company.
Middle of the road, though, you end up being a few people's go-to person, a
wonderful place to be in this increasingly competitive world.

~~~
purplezooey
_The Promus of Formularies, Elegancie, and Python Scripts_

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lubujackson
This is a great way to find ideas for a startup btw... the classic one is
finding out what tedious stuff people do in Excel all day then simplify and
automate.

I will say for me I spend probably too long opening a series of programs and
getting set up before I can work. I believe there is software for this, but my
dream is to have it simple and customizable by project. I would love to be
able to open everything to the right directory and the right apps for working
on different projects, or adjust the ones I need at any time based on being at
a different point in the project.

All told this is just a few minutes every morning, but always a minor
annoyance.

~~~
ttamslam
I would absolutely love a keyboard shortcut per project so I could hot swap
between services without having to worry about killing containers, building
new ones, opening and then resizing/positioning editors, opening
(resizing/positioning) spec docs.

I agree this sounds trivial, but the overhead of getting my multi-monitor
setup just right when switching to a new service in the codebase is enough to
kill flow.

~~~
vcavallo
window manager plus tmux could probably take you far. i agree that “trivial”
frictions like this really add up to stress and work avoidance

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rivercam
"I’d have to log into GCloud console every once in a while to check if I still
have enough credits" => that is the _perfect_ task to automate with "Kantu".

[https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu](https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu)

In a nutshell it is a macro recorder for the web browser (Open-Source browser
extension for Chrome and Firefox).

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angelmass
I try to script everything that I have to do on a regular basis, or that I
have to do repeatedly and have to look up how to perform each time. For me,
this is a random assortment that I can remember off the top of my head:

* creating a json for meeting notes from a template based on the type of meeting (1on1, mentorship, some project, etc), that includes action items and other relevant metadata from the last meeting of that type with that person/group * creating a todoist item for a particular project * killing any running processes that match a particular string * various git hooks for linting or mirroring changes between GitHub and bitbucket * scraping the AKC website to see if there are any new puppy litters listed for the particular kind of dog I’m looking for, and emailing the results to myself and my girlfriend * loading a particular subset of deidentified prod data into my local db for dev work * adding/enabling openssh to a docker container to be able to use a remote ssh interpreter

But in general, something I heard a while ago in reference to finding niche
work when contracting as a dev in an industry that you might be unfamiliar
with is “find what people are using excel for, and automate it”.

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GlenTheMachine
Honestly? Make “status update” slides. If I had a tool that could take a
Markdown list of weekly achievements, turn that into slides, automatically add
a schedule or Gantt chart that was adjusted to the current date, and pull from
a set of stock boilerplate verbiage to fill it out to the required page count
I would pay a hundred bucks for it out of my own pocket.

And yes, I do know about pandoc.

~~~
lkschubert8
You should check out landslide.
[https://github.com/adamzap/landslide/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/adamzap/landslide/blob/master/README.md)

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trillic
This was essentially my job description at my first internship as a "Systems
Administrator" at a business consulting firm. The firm was fairly small and
they didn't want to give a 17 year old the keys to the to the kingdom so I
just wrote excel macros and some bash/python for anybody who wanted automation
but didn't know how.

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Raed667
I found myself having 2 time sinks:

\- git: even with a lot of "bash automation" when it comes to cloning
projects, rebasing and merging is still a pain.

\- Switching databases/workspaces when working on different versions of a
product. Fixing a minor bug could take a few hours waiting for things to pull,
setup, build, run etc..

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hprotagonist
I used to generate python project stubs over and over, then i found
[https://github.com/ionelmc/cookiecutter-
pylibrary](https://github.com/ionelmc/cookiecutter-pylibrary)

------
hnruss
I'm a software developer at a small company.

My typical daily flow is usually like so:

\- Check email, slack, etc. and respond

\- Review PR

\- Test PR

\- Respond to PR

\- Review case requirements

\- Respond to case requirements

\- Write code for case

\- Test code for case

\- Create PR

Some of my coworkers use AutoHotkey for automating common tasks, but I don't
feel like I'd save that much time by using that. I probably waste the most
time waiting for builds, which can take up to 20 seconds. I tend to lose focus
when I have to wait for things, which probably impacts my productivity.

I don't really do a lot of repetitive tasks. This is something that I really
like about being a software developer. If I had a task that was annoyingly
repetitive, I'd automate it myself.

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charlieo88
"Uh… we have sort of a problem here. Yeah. You apparently didn’t put one of
the new coversheets on your TPS reports."

I have to format my daily work log two different ways, one in a PDF and one in
a word document.

~~~
Random_Person
I have the same problem, so I spent a month of my free time writing a
reporting tool that does this for me. It sorts my activities into tasks and
updates, and I can generate reports based on dates/tasks/etc. It's been a life
saver for those stupid reports.

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vwcx
The OppsDaily newsletter (started by someone on HN?) has lots of these little
tasks: [http://www.oppsdaily.com/](http://www.oppsdaily.com/)

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henripal
I do machine learning/data science consulting, mostly for startups. Literally
80% of my time is cleaning data and coding up basic ML for their excel
spreadsheets :)

~~~
zihua
Man that's so annoying... what do you mean by "for their excel spreadsheet"
though? Also, have you tried something like AutoML?

~~~
henripal
Most of the data outside software startups is in Excel spreadsheets :) And yes
- believe it or not I rolled out a Beta version of an AutoML app for
spreadsheets app today!

~~~
toomuchtodo
Is this something you’ve opened sourced or are charging for? Very interested
either way!

~~~
henripal
Email me (email in profile) - not open source but completely free Beta. Just
trying to figure out if it's something people would be interested in. (Edit:
email rather than DM)

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quickthrower2
I use git a lot and I find it quite repetitive, but I know if I spent a bit of
time I could compose commands into scripts and all that.

Apart from that, no not really. I guess that’s the perk of working at a small
company. One day I’m DevOps, the next I’m Front End, the next DBA etc.

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analog31
We have a product that can be customized in a particular way. After quoting
several custom orders, I created a Jupyter notebook that automates my
computations for both the quoting process, and ultimately for manufacturing if
an order comes through.

Then I taught my colleague how to use the tool.

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m-p-3
Hardware inventory taking, I need to figure out a faster and less tedious way
of doing it. Was thinking maybe building a kind of barcode system to speed up
the data-entry process when going out on a floor to eliminate the possibility
of mistyped data.

~~~
ScottFree
QR codes and a handful of cheap smartphones are a fairly easy and low cost
method of doing this. You can even make an android app to streamline the
process even farther.

Of course, I'm still trying to find a good solution for printing those QR
codes. Printers suck and printing labels is it's own special kind of hell.

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jadeydi
I'm a software engineer too, I'll check us error logs nearly every day.

~~~
cyberfart
This is something definitely worth automating in my experience.

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neves
I must every month allocate how much time I spent in each task/project

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zwischenzug
I wrote a framework for these kind of things, a wrapper on top of (p)expect:

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit)

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ape4
Read Hacker News ;)

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rolph
Justification of expense requests. Drudgery!

Im a contractor so what i do is, "What do you need done?".

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ill0gicity
My most common repetitive task at work? Writing scripts to avoid repetitive
tasks.

~~~
mrccc
You should automate that!

~~~
LittlePeter
And then rewrite it in rust

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Rerarom
None. (I am a pure math researcher.)

~~~
spaceheretostay
Not sure if serious or joking.

You don't stand up every now and then to stretch your legs?

You don't take a sip of coffee or tea or water periodically?

You don't ever run out of ink or pens or paper and have to get new ones?

You don't ever check your email or flip through math journals looking for
interesting new papers being published?

You don't ever turn on a computer or turn it off/put it to sleep?

These are all repetitive tasks and I have a hard time imagining you do none of
them or anything like them in your work life.

You don't refresh HN ever to see if there are new stories related to your pure
math?

You don't ever type your ideas into a document and email it to someone?

You don't ever log in to any financial account to view balances?

You don't ever check your phone to see if someone has texted or if there is an
important message waiting?

You don't ever spin a pen on your fingers while you think?

You don't ever pace around while thinking?

You don't ever have something online you have to manually log into to check
for work? Vacation days? Researcher collaborations? Grant results? Nothing?

You don't have to get gas to fill up your car tank? Do you work remotely? You
don't have to check the bus schedule or wait for the subway? Doing the same
thing every day that doesn't really require your mental energy - like filling
up your tank of gas on the way to work - is something I would call repetitive.

You don't ever click on links to open video chats or type in phone numbers to
make phone calls?

~~~
chpmrc
The keyword should be "tedious", not just repetitive. I wouldn't want a
machine to automate my getting up and stretching or making and drinking a
coffee, those are activities that are arguably needed to keep oneself sane
while working.

~~~
spaceheretostay
Maybe you don't want such a machine, but I sure do! And I consider all of
those things tedious, and repetitive. I get that not every startup idea or
problem-solution set is for everyone - but come on, I'm out here pitching
dozens of real-world relatable problems that real people have.

I honestly don't believe that there are people with 0 repetitive tasks in
their lives that could see no improvements with software (or hardware?). It's
just not possible.

~~~
chpmrc
Like I said, not repetitive, tedious. And tediousness is purely subjective. So
I agree with you that we _should_ have machines to do tedious tasks for us, I
just don't agree that the tasks I mentioned are tedious for enough people to
justify having a machine for them.

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keabel4
Check HN.

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agoldis
Arguing with my boss

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interactivecode
ftping files to build drupal themes...

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djohnston
meetings

~~~
ConfusedDog
Heh. 1000 meetings later, we still need more meetings for reducing repetitive
tasks. I feel like this world is no longer real.

~~~
maxxxxx
Let me schedule a weekly "Drive Team" meeting to address this.

