Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be? Hello HN! We're currently working on a work automation platform. We have a few capabilities that we're building to help you do your work better. For guidance it would be super helpful to hear directly from the HN crowd :) Please do comment below about one thing you'd like to see automated. Would super awesome if you could complete this quick 1-min survey: https://bit.ly/2MjN6fd Many thanks! |
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...
do.sh stuff &
wait; do-other-stuff.sh -123 &
wait; cd ../; do-something-else.sh
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.
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.
“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?
Many channels on slack + email threads + conversations on DMs
I spend too much time looking at email and can’t seem to get the hang of the gmail labels system
In Google Apps Script, fetch all mail with that label, process as wanted, like sending replies, moving, deleting; & then remove the label.
I have to feed and give fresh & vitamin water to birds almost everyday. I wish, I could automate that somehow.
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
- 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
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
A stand up is already short and down to "the important stuff" and it is a key part of the process that the people attending express themselves and listen.
Does this mean keeping all status up to date in Jira? 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.
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.
Basically our team can't complete an issue without a commit, and a commit message won't be accepted without an issue tag.
(Issues can also be closed as "won't fix" without a commit of course.)