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Ask HN: If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?

by qrt on 12/21/19, 2:52 PM with 34 comments

• by sheeeep86 on 12/21/19, 9:00 PM

  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...

• by lowdose on 12/21/19, 8:30 PM

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

• by arsenide on 12/21/19, 8:14 PM

  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.

• by quickthrower2 on 12/21/19, 11:45 PM

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

• by protoweek on 12/21/19, 3:22 PM

  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

• by opportune on 12/21/19, 7:09 PM

  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

• by pks016 on 12/21/19, 4:47 PM

  Not related to software.

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

• by powerbottle on 12/21/19, 3:05 PM

  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

• by axaxs on 12/22/19, 1:24 AM

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

• by markus_zhang on 12/25/19, 11:06 PM

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

• by pitcher on 12/21/19, 3:00 PM

  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

• by sellingwebsite on 12/21/19, 7:26 PM

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