

Ask HN: What Do You Automate? - MichaelAza

At my office, we try to automate as much as possible. We automate builds and deployment but also less &quot;techie&quot; stuff like downloading the office Youtube playlist to a local computer.<p>So, HN, what do you automate? What tools do you use for that?
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nattaylor
My threshold for considering automation is doing it once :) but if the work to
automate is non-trivial, then I usually don't get around to it until the 3rd
cycle.

I usually evaluate a few things, in this order: 1\. How much time will it take
to do manually vs automated? 2\. What are the chances I'm going to have to do
this again? 3\. Is it useful to just me, or other people too? 4\. Do I get any
value by doing this without automation? (e.g. will I gain insight by taking
time to go through this process, that I would miss if I built a tool to just
do it)

...but I suppose that's mostly for "tasks" whereas you mean "processes" in the
sense that a process is more difficult to automate because it has more steps
and dependencies. In that case, I think there are more evaluation criteria
like:

-What is the risk of doing this manually and screwing it up?

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LoneWolf
As what I automate mostly anything that is repetitive, if I have to do it more
than five times I automate it (not a hard rule).

About the tools I just search if there is anything that can do it, otherwise I
will try to code it.

There is not much more to say about it.

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gee_totes
My job search

[http://nolatechjobs.leesome.com/](http://nolatechjobs.leesome.com/)

Built with a chron job tied to jeckyll

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Spoom
kiriappeee, your account is shadowbanned.

In answer to the original question, we're similar to the poster; if it's a
non-trivial task that will need to be done more than a few times, we'll set up
a script.

