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Ask HN: What task did you stop automating?

by onuralp on 7/2/19, 3:12 PM with 4 comments

• by mtmail on 7/2/19, 4:27 PM

  In a SaaS immediately deleting an account after a paying user clicks 'delete my account'.

  Instead there's a confirmation that somebody from the support team will take care. Users (from what I've read on blogs) often suspect that's because we try to upsell or keep the account open longer. Not the case. We want to review the account because in the past users had multiple and they closed the wrong one, we had manual payment arrangements setup which months later triggered a payment, see if a refund is due (e.g. user cancelled one day after an invoice was paid or they haven't logged it a whole month), and lastly we want to thank larger customers personally.

• by nikisweeting on 7/2/19, 5:03 PM

  At our scale manual deploys seem to have fewer outages than automatic ones, so I've moved back from automating the deploys to simply providing easy commands to do 99% of the deploy work, but still requiring them to be triggered manually. I suspect this balance will shift towards favoring more CI/CD automation once we reach a bigger scale.

• by hnruss on 7/2/19, 4:05 PM

  I generally try to prevent large amounts of data from being automatically downloaded or uploaded, so I disable things like automatic git fetch (when working with a large repository), automatic cloud backups, automatic updates, etc. This configuration tends to occur organically over time as I encounter unexpected moments of device slowness and "fix" the problem by disabling the offending automation.