TODOs top 5

[x] create README.md with TODOs
[ ] add tests
[ ] write documentation
[ ] automate deployment
[ ] improve security

I keep forgetting people's birthdays and thereby I forget to wish people, and wishing people everyday can become a chore. As somebody once said, if you do something more than once, automate it.

Spent two hours and ended up building a bot that consists of four functions: login, checkIfAuthenticated, postToProfile and getBirthdaysToday using mostly axios and cheerio.

Currently works perfectly and I've been thinking of writing a blog post about it for my 'Automating Your Life' series.

I'll post the link in the comments soon when I'm done with the blog post.

Mission: automate scrolling to test a project.
Step 0: nail clippers and coaster

Mother of fucking god, its astonishing to see how difficult it is to entirely block out Google from your computer.

Actually, its very easy and I wrote something to automate that but the second you block out that goddamned mass surveillance network, every login page of every goddamn site with a fucking recaptcha just doesn't work anymore.

Google, go fuck yourself and with that, every motherfucking site which uses recaptcha.

Automate everything

Got bored at work today and tried to write a program to do my job for me. Security and compliance saw it in the logs (trying to run unauthorized program) and came to give me a hug.

When you write scripts to automate stuff because you're lazy, but you spend so much time writing them it makes you doubt your own laziness

Automate all the things 😀

I saw a colleague of mine cry when I was undertaking my first internship.
Asked them why they were crying and i found out they were very frustrated at a task she had to do periodically, which required repetitive work.

I wrote a script to automate the task without being requested to, since I had some spare time and when I told them they hugged me and thanked me a lot.

I live in the terminal. I write lots of scripts (Shell, Python, node js) to automate tasks that would take hours to do by my teammates. Recently, I started automating everything that I put my hands on using Ansile: from pointing DNS server to continuons deployment, provisionning a fully customized infrastructure on the cloud using just a single command!

This is because automation gives you super power, the feeling that what you do help tl increase the productivity, reduce bugs etc.. Simply, once mastered, automation is ausome!

"I think I can automate this..."

Update on my student job :

Today they put me on a new project.
Basically, I have to update a database of buildings owned or rented by the company. They provided me a lot of data including the address of each building but I need the GPS coordinates.
They wanted me to do it manually, copy pasting from Google maps (info: there's 75 buildings).
So I wrote a small script using an API to automate that, took me 20 minutes.

My colleagues were like "how the fuck is that possible ? We always do it manually, always takes ages !"

1. Just because it sounds cool doesn't mean it is.
2. Automate all the things. If you can see everything from cli all the better.
3. If it isn't commited and pushed, it doesn't exist or won't after a hard drive burnout
4. Everything on your workstation should be quickly reproduceable or in a git repo.
5. Murphy is a bitch

If you are not wasting your 10hours to automate your half hour work then you are not a real programmer.

Been coding for hours, trying to automate the processing of over 500 rows of data, I refuse to do that manually.

At least I have company

Programming has taught me that time is a valuable and under appreciated resource.

if a task is repeated multiple times per week / month, you have at your finger tips the ability to automate the hell out of it and let your computer deal with the task instead.

QA: You need to write a test script for your new web app before it can go live

Me: ok, I'll write some tests in PHP unit and automate the tests.

QA: Oh, can you do that? We just normally write a list in excel then go through each line and write pass or fail at the end.

Me: yeah, good one.

QA: Umm, I'm not joking.

Queue awkward silence...

I wish I could learn Machine Learning. Automate my work and blame the machine for missing deadline.

Not me, but a colleague questioned himself for a while over this one. He simply forgot a semicolon when doing some server maintenance:

sudo yum remove application1 sudo yum remove application2

This didn't just remove application1 and 2, it removed sudo and yum too. One slightly embarrassing call to the ops team later, we had to replace the box.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should automate your server maintenance!

Really pissed me off when I tell someone that I am teaching myself how to code and they're like.. "Don't you have to go to school for that?"

YES.. I wish I could go to school but I am broke, have no family support, and got no credits for a loan. But at least I am seeking out other resources! The mentality of some people I swear!!

Life of a junior self-taught dev with a sysadmin job:

1)At work, desperately try to script and automate every task, even when it isn't nessecary.

2)Learn dev skills from tutorials and web courses at every minute of your free time.

3)When returning home get self-guilt because you're procrastinating instead of doing an all-night development like your dev friends

4)The only productive thing you do is more tutorials and courses because you feel your dev skills aren't high enough for a self project

Frustrated.

Recruiter: “can you write your own framework?”

Me, after considering for a good minute: “well, I am kinda starting to automate lots of things so I guess if I wanted I may be able to... for sure I’d learn a lot along the way...”

Recruiter: “very good!”

Me:”wait, why would you want that skill?”

Recruiter: “our customers want custom code”

Me:”so you write a new framework every time?”

Recruiter: “ah you have also experience in [x]!”

Some people scare me 😟

Does anyone else fantasize about giving up programming and go live in a jungle or doing other things that require more physical effort?

I've been learning carpentry, farming, DIY power generation etc. The goal is to be self-sufficient and go live in a fucking jungle someday. Or legally buy some cheap land far from the city and automate the shit out of it. No wait, I'll just live there as a normal farmer and write code if I feel nostalgic or something.

I think anyone other than me could have expressed that better.

If I spend 50% of my time in meetings, 30% of my time doing things for support/helpdesk which I'm not allowed to automate, 10% as a technical consult and 10% helping other devs... am I even a developer anymore?

HR: Hey we heard about all of the apps you are building and we were wondering if you could build one for us too

Dev: Well I’d have to run it by my manager first, what kind of app were you looking to build?

HR: Ok basically it’s a button that when you press it it completes the list of daily tasks that normally take us all day everyday like payroll and attendance reporting.

Dev: You…. want me to…automate your entire job away?

HR: No! We would be the ones to push the button😡.

Dev: I….. I’ll…. I will pass that along.

Boss asked me to make a script to automate some tasks. After some days i found out that my task will replace the job of one of our colleagues.
Now the *script, that looks like a big project, is almost done.
Feel for the guy.

So python, who knew it could automate a lot of crappy tasks 😎
Actually I did, but god it’s so quick and easy to implement than expected.

I have a new formed respect for python devs after my day of web crawling and ftp transfers and outlook mining 😘

I must use GPT-3 to automate my daily rants on DevRant.

Wanted to automate some stuff through bash scripts but did want to separate tasks so I wrote two bash scripts for data processing.

Hmm.. two scripts..... how could I even further automate thi....

*writes script which executed those two scripts*

😄

Did anybody of you automate job hunting?

Like Webscraping online job offers, extract adress, keywords and put it into a cv template, set up personalised html-email and website.
Extra perk, a neural network which composes the cover letter.

that i would need.

Ah finally, the moment when being a web developer is full of joy.

☑️ Server-side rendering
☑️ Inline critical css
☑️ Add progressive image loading
☑️ Minify everything
☑️ Automate release process in CI
☑️ Lint everything

Now that the strucutre is up, time to code the actual website. This is gonna be good!

Needed a list with all domains I run on a server but I don't always give nginx config files the names of their website so I was about to start going through them by hand..... waaait, let's try to automate this with a bash script...

Five minutes later I've got a working bash script which gets all domains from all config files.

Oh, the joys of terminal/bash stuff!

Supervisor: let's automate this stuff

Me: great! let's do it to last and future proof it. So, as changes happen we can implement in-place upgrades efficiently without taking the system down

Supervisor: well let's not get too crazy

My boss just asked me for a cheat sheet I have that lists all our app server's paths.

The paths are attached as annotations throughout some Java files.

Anyway I send him the one I have but he asks if he could have an updated one.

Now imagine if I were like most monkeys and had made this cheat sheet by hand....

2 mins easy vs an(other) hour of grunt work

Why is it that I'm the only person on the team that writes utilities to automate boring grunt work while everyone else just does it manually whenever it needed....

Isn't DRY a core principle of being a developer?

I'm the only person that builds utility apps that automate frequent tasks that people keep asking us to do....

Automated a process which was being perfomed manually for 5 years !
Client is so happy comes up with more stuffs to automate.

How do I don’t over complicate things?

Background: I’m currently working for a game with some base project. It alr has pretty complicated ai and some other system.

Today, I was asked by boss to help him set up a test environment for testing taking damage of a character.

First I tried to read up how the battle system and ai works in the base project. Figured, it’s overkill for this testing purpose.

Then, tried to use some plugin to automate the ai and movement. Make the enemy follow the target and stuff.

Alr spending half day, then suddenly realised all I need is just to make one script that takes damage on collision.

Why am I still a programmer? 😭

'Be long-term lazy.'

As in:
Work hard.
DRY.
If it takes more than 20 minutes, then automate it.
Prevent repeated work by testing just enough.

After a long wait of 8 months, C.H.I.P the 8$ headless computer finally arrived. And since I have already made something like a cheap hack of siri(I call it dyna and it lets me control my laptop with voice), I am going to automate the f*** out of my home!!!

Setup my port honeypot today finally, including port 22, then wrote a custom dashboard for some data tracking, feels great to have it open on my screen seeing the bans just roll in every 2 seconds of refresh, the highest hits are as expected from china, russia and india, also filed ~700 reports and already got 300 banned from their service. (mainly Microsoft Azure for whatever reason)

I wanted to first automate that (or atleast blacklist report to various IP lists via API), but then I was afraid that I'll be one day stupid enough to somehow get banned - don't want myself to get reported lol

Not gonna lie. Automate the Boring Stuff With Python lives up to the hype.

When I wrote a script to automate my commits to SVN... And then used that script to commit itself.... Pure bliss :)

I've just noticed an app review that I've given and would fit right into the wk123 (that's the insult one, right?).

"Biggest pile of junk that I've ever seen. You have one job! To register the fucking phone number (which you could get with Phone permission) and verify it (which you can do with the SMS permission) and you should either have the user do that once upon installation or you automate it entirely so that it can run in the background! You can fully automate this, and it's not that complicated that it needs 10 whole seconds of loading time in between! Heck, this pile of crap can't even continue into the main view after entering the verification code! You haven't published the source code (and maybe that's for the best) but if it was, I'd probably immediately get cancer by viewing your crappy spaghetti code. Dear developer, please take a step back and (re)join the PC tech support guys. You have no place in the development world."

To top it all off, that app currently only needs phone permission to verify my number (at least they've done that much). So I figured, I've already gone through that authentication flow so let's remove that permission to abide by the principle of least privilege.

Except that the fucking crapp just goes through the "requires phone permission" shit again whenever that permission removal happens. Fucking piece of garbage!!! That such spaghetti code fuckers even have a job, it boggles my mind.

When you automate so much stuffs that you forget where the config files are at.

Holy fuck this new GitHub feature is amazing!!!
It's called GitHub Actions and you can easy automate your work flow using a simple graphical editor!
I need to test this out right fucking now!

What if we were the AI created by God to automate repetitive tasks and now we are making AI to automate those repetitive tasks and this goes on and on until the world gets a stack overflow.

* Learn GoLang
* Automate backup on all my servers
* Finish small projects
* Begin on a bigger GoLang project

Coworker made a tool to automate part of our job and she sent it to me. After 5 seconds of using it I found a bug... she has been using it for weeks. Now I don't trust anything she has done around here. (It's a financial tool and the bug is changing certain numbers to negative so it subtracts instead of adds...)

I’m not going to “automate” us out of a job ! *eye roll* We just shouldn’t be doing things a computer can do AND do faster/more accurately!

WELL GEE, IF I KNEW WHAT MY ACCOUNT USERNAME WAS, I WOULD JUST SIGN IN YOU ASSHOLE. -.-

On top of that, they use these fucking anchent capchas that are fucking case sensitive and annoying as hell..

In their defence, I was trying to automate their website (one of those get paid to click sites) in an atempt to get some money, but still!

I've had two DevOps engineers ask me how I deploy new pipelines so quickly.

I show them how I automate the automation.

I can't believe how difficult it is to convince people in a *tech* company to automate things.

"oh yeah it's only a couple of times a year. How much work is it gonna take to automate it, it'll take us only a few minutes to do manually"

That's how you get stuck in the past.

Who says Windows is useless....

Running a python script to swap wifi networks, auto connect to VPN servers, run SSH commands and SFTP files to servers, downloading numerous files, sifting through outlook for emails, running excel macros for data cleansing, cell merging and formulas all at the click of a button 😱

Oh yea.. this is all 1 task that I never have to do again😂

Windows is useless for development you say? 🤔

My son is into playing Roblox. He asked me to help him find an auto clicker that doesn't have viruses/malware. We looked into cheatengine (which I have used in the past), but despite getting it from a legit source it is getting flagged as malware. So we started writing one with Python. I did check to see what their policy on bots is:

"Using bots that are programmed to run disruptive, large-scale tasks"

is the only text I can find about bots. It seems like they don't care if you make bots to automate tasks or play the game.

I plan on having some fun with this and including a little gui to control the bot while the game runs in the background (the goal). I had tried to get my son to have an interest in programming so this is a good intro.

In my current project my team lead created a revolutionary framework, which is capable to automate any manual work..

Here is its source code..

public class AutomateFW {

public Object automate(Object manualWork) {

// Call jr developers and assign them work :)
callFreshers(manualWork);

}

"Take an extra paid day off"

"You are right. This will automate that boring task."

"You did everything that was tasked to you in this sprint? You can rest or help in testing something. "

+ Death of Wix and WordPress (hopefully)
+ Abandonment of Java
- Bajillion JavaScript frameworks
- Software engineers trying to automate everything
+ Cloud blockchain AI containers that mine bitcoin with machine learning technology in high demand

I am too lazy to automate a task from which I suffer each month one or two hours (for the last 7 years).. Automation would cost me only one or two hours at most!

Department wants us to give feedback on teachers. They ask so many times but they dont consider our feedback at all.
So I got frustrated and wrote a script to automate this process. 😅
Now I won't worry even if they ask 1000 times also. I'll just press f5 😂

> at my previous job as mechanical engineer at an HVAC company
> was given recurring monotonous task
> decided to start a sizeable side project to automate it
> people got pissed at me because it worked too well, i.e., took their jerbs
> decided automating things was more fun than actual current job; also, people should be more hyped about continuous improvement
> switched careers into web-development

i.e., my most successful project was the one that changed my life for the better.

Getting comfortable in one place for too long and stagnating. It can be easy to automate your job until you can just milk it, but sit still too long and your skills will be irrelevant.

People talk about ageism in development... don't let your mind get old and you'll always have job security.

That feeling you get when you write an automation package on top of selenium and python that at a press of a button runs through an entire User Checkout process 😍

Oh the hours this is going to save me.
Now to see what else I can automate in my day to day life.

Writing a script to do my job

We started a project in January for which I was the sole developer, to automate tedious interaction with a vendor's ticketing system. We have a storage environment with about 400,000 commodity disks attached(for this vendor-- there are other vendors too), in sites around the US and Canada. With a weekly failure rate of about 0.0005%, that means about 200 disks a week need to be replaced.

This work-- hardware investigation through storage appliance frontends, internal ticket creation, external ticket creation, watching the external ticket for updates to include in our internal ticket --was all manual, and for around 200 issues a week, it was done by one guy for two years. He was hopelessly behind. This is all automated now, and this morning, I pushed this automation from dev/test to production.

It feels great to see your work helping people around you.

Hate when my boss says, "hey you, over there, can please automate this stuff, is a pain in the ass..."

“You should automate that”

Said by me at least once to every family member.

“But I can’t, it’s impossible!”

Said by every family member to me.

Follows a discussion about how easy its to automate the thing, ofter interrupted by me cause I don’t care enough to go in detail just to be asked to automate it.

I can't wait until I automate you.

i find when your having a slow day, or just don’t have the motivation to deal with the current task at hand, picking up a side project and working on that keeps you going.

either that or automate that crappy task you do at 9am every day!

It only took me half an hour to automate something that would have taken me 5 minutes!

Just started a new job yesterday in Software Config. I mentioned automating something that could be easily automated, and my coworker looked up and said "You're trying to automate 80% of my job. Stop."... This is my life now.

Whenever I automate a lot of menial code, so that after that I only declare what I want, and I immediately and automatically get it just the way I wanted, I feel LIKE A GOD.

Bow to me you stupid computer! I now command you with just a thought!

Why can't you use C? Asked by a client wanting a web app to automate office processes.

you motherfucking cocksucking ass wipes.

How fucking hard is it for you JS cockheads to have STABLE fucking code?

So hear I am, thinking through a side project for data extraction and loading to automate some shitty part of my job, that could be used by the broader team... and decide to use electron.... I know it's a clusterfuck, but this wouldn't be a big application, so against my better judgement I run:

npm install electron
npm start
...
Error: unknown spawn

🤷‍♂️ you had 1 fucking job... 1 fucking lousy shit stain of a job, and you can't even have something run out of the god foresaken box without someone debugging your shit.

Now who has a WORKING alternative to electron?

Got a new job in a new team.

Someone had to learn that software. I said I could.

I was punched by old team most of the time because they did not want to transfer the ownership to us, they had to and I had to learn that
Software.

I made it, worked hard to automate daily stuffs.

Described each victory in my year review with manager.

Each thank you, I poked my Manager to promote me if she thinks I deserve.

I got promoted a year later.

Secretly installed Automate app on my friend's Android phone to mess with him. (For those who don't know, with Automate you can automate anything on an Android device).
Made a 'flow' that would read his incoming sms's, and send an email to me with his exact location if I sent him an SMS saying 'where are you?'.
Was funny to mess with him and tell him his exact location even though we were miles apart.
Cleared it up for him a while later but it made me feel like #hackerman

Corporate jobs... where you spend most of the time doing stupid work because of idiots in the team.

There was a script to automate some manual task. However that script had a bug. The script was then updated.

Still there is some idiot out there in the wild who runs the old script now and then and causes issues.

We have written another script to counter the effect of that buggy script! 🤦‍♀️

That moment when it takes 4 hours to automate a task which would otherwise take 15min all 2 months to do manually.

Ideas for future weekly question:

- Where will you see yourself in 5 years?
- Do you automate tasks when developing and what kind of automation do you write yourself or use?
- What do you think about hooking up with someone from work?
- What are your thoughts about books in IT?
- How do you make your workplace comfortable?
- How would you change your company if you became the boss today?
- What are your thoughts about the future of computer input devices (kb & mice)?
- What are your prevention measures agains Skynet?
- When will HL3 be released?
- What's the solution to everything?

That moment, when you found Pikachu but not able to catch him.

*writing bot to automate*

Wen want to get away from boring, monotonous and meaningless jobs so we can focus more on music and art. Thats why we created AI to automate music and art so you have more time to feel like shit.

After you automate away task into a tool or program, do you tell your boss or keep it to yourself so they remain amazed at your efficiency and productivity?

And for data analysis ones, that you have godly data processing skills as you can somehow read a 1,000,000 line log file and find the root cause and other insights in an hour or minutes?

First rant, technically a sysadmin but getting into the nitty-gritty of programming with some things to improve my job (and hopefully moving into something more technical).

Have been doing a paid internship at my utility company. I do patch management with SCCM and sometimes the updates break. I've been using Powershell to reset the Windows update cache to make the computers work again. Unfortunately, this sometimes involves logging into machines to do some manual work and I have to notify users before I log in if they're already logged in.

Scripts can be run silently but I've spent a few weeks trying to automatically retry Software Center updates with Powershell … before realizing just today that the system center action "Application Deployment Evaluation Cycle" does indeed do the thing I've been attempting to do with Powershell for weeks now.

Wish me luck as I automate that part of the process and completely automate the sole job they gave me to do. Don't tell on me!

Corporate pushed a change to our PC's which similataneously installed chrome and pushed their security policies on us. Extensions are no longer available. I can't sign in with my chrome account anymore. I can't automate ui testing with selenium. I can't control any chrome settings, they're controlled by group policies now.

I guess it's time to switch to Firefox. At least until they block that. At least the UI testing still is functional on that...

The WiFi at my office requires username and password to sign-in and logs out after every few hours. Then I have to tap on "sign in" and submit the username and password again.

Is there any fucking way I could automate this.......?

God fucking damnit automating a client's "Job applicant form" system is the most boring shit l've ever done.
Get me some damn monkeys to do this
"Oh OK so I just have to take this form and turn it into HTML. Oh shit, 25 check box's, let's just copy paste this shit in over and over. Oh damn, forgot I have to change the name and value fields for each one. God damnit this is boring, I guess I have to"
Fucking hell it's annoying work, Boring, easy, no thought needed. Ended up turning this task into a drinking game. Every time the word "Management" came up, I took a shot. Got me pretty fucked up.
Client emails back; "Oh ya, I forgot to tell you, we have these 3 other forms we want you to automate".
Well fuck at this point I feel like more of an alcoholic than a developer.

#wk13
Client: Let's get our car online using the phone as the router!
Me: let's do that!
Client: Can we use NFC as the protocol?
Me: Probably, but just to automate the connection..
Client: No we should use NFC for the entire session!
Me: No!
Client: Why not? It's new, it's happening, bosses will be excited!
Me: You do know what the N in NFC stands for right!
Client: New?
Me: -_- thinking "I hope you lose your genitals to a horrible case of blue waffles.."

Question: How do i automate sales people?

Best:
- optimized a lot of queries and pieces of code
- graduated from the dutch equivalent of community college
- started a new education
- updated our password schema from a shameful algorithm to bcrypt

Worst:
- haven't been able to convince my colleague and bosses to automate stuff
- still no tests
- still a php dev
- still alone

2018:
Come at me with your c++ and robots! I'll fucking master you!

Software engineering is slowly being lowered to a basic skill to please corporations that literally want you to automate your job away. The only fruitful areas of software engineering that I can see being relevant in the next 10 years are those mixed with other hard sciences such as bioinformatics, robotics, bleeding edge statistics and mathematics (AI research), physics, etc. The trend I see right now is that software engineering is being integrated with business-oriented degrees or arts degrees, targeted programs towards beginners offered for free or low prices. There's going to be a higher barrier of entry for the jobs that are actually worth the stress and I'm praying I'll be able to catch the train before it leaves the station.

While in the banking world, I had a project where I had to automate an import into a shit system called CRAWiz. The data had to come from multiple archaic loan systems with no API and tons of shit data.

After implementing, the shit data came to light. Instead of fixing shit data (and using their loan systems correctly), they decided to go back to digging through physical files and manually importing. They blamed CRAWiz and decided to go with a new system to import their shit data into. I warned them repeatedly that a new system would not fix the shit data but they couldn't accept it. I left at that point. 😂

automate literally everything! (very ambiguous and overly ambitious. please read it all.)

Ahh.. there is nothing like the joyous feeling of writing a working piece of code for your own personal projects.

I spent several weeks and a few hours today to finally get my Python automation script working and I am very proud of myself.

Here's what it does:
* open a text file, extract a specific string from it using rather complicated xpath
* open another text file and do the same
* replace result 1 with result 2
* log results
* close file
* automate the process

Even though it looks easy, I had to mess around with a lot of problems such as permissions, indentation, stream writing, file status, etc.

Now, instead of having to manually do this job, I can just let my machine do it!

It all starts with a small regex script to automate my coding session. Now I start to automate every shit I used to hate (without notice it).

Where was Python all my life. Where was it when I have to configure my server, run integration tests or benchmark all by myself. The past was really scary 😂

all of them. countless wasted hours.

as fate decided to turn me from $random-dev-geek into "the guy that calls the shots in tech", one of my earliest decisions was to automate formatting.

everywhere, automated at CI.

gofmt was an inspiration for the industry.
js?/ts? use prettier
C++? use ClangFormat
etc.

always default settings.
enforced by pre-commit hooks and CI.

never a single argument about bracket style, I don't care if someone likes single or double quotes better.

"fucks given" counter is fixed at 0.
everybody prefers it (ok, sometimes after a while sometimes)

of course there is still some more conventions to do for us humans.
IMHO the most critical ones.

like naming or even casing (camel, snake, kebab, - which one works where), but taking out most of the "so what" decisions takes discussions to a much more resonable level.

That feeling when you automate something and let the script run while being away from the computer.

One does not really appreciate pre-built binaries until he has to build a massive code-base [and it takes hours on top-notch hardware, plus a lot of error tweaking].

Thank you to all the open-source supporters that take their time to pre-compile binaries and/or automate builds.

As contributors, they deserve our appreciation as much as developers do.

Automate & chill

Corporations... huge, old, monolithic
We want you to automate but will do everything we can to prevent you from getting resources to do it. Restricting policies, decisions by managers on "what they do not want". No procedures on how to achieve the result within policies. Half the business lives in a gray zone and sea of policy exceptions.
We finally decided to get at least Azure subscription instead of trying to develop similar framework internally, but wE DoNT WANt YOu to dEPlOY thERE As WE Don't cOnSIDEr it sAfE ENough.
Like pissing against wind.

I suspected that our storage appliances were prematurely pulling disks out of their pools because of heavy I/O from triggered maintenance we've been asked to automate. So I built an application that pulls entries from the event consoles in each site, from queries it makes to their APIs. It then correlates various kinds of data, reformats them for general consumption, and produces a CSV.

From this point, I am completely useless. I was able to make some graphs with gnumeric, libre calc, and (after scraping out all the identifying info) Google sheets, but the sad truth is that I'm just really bad at desktop office document apps. I wound up just sending the CSV to my boss so he can make it pretty.

Goals for 2018

Finish all my udemy courses I purchased back in 2016 and never watched

Learn to write tests for all my work

Figure out the shitty api in Drupal 8

Redesign my apps so they look pretty and make me more money.

Learn to Automate my app feeds

Redesign my company website to look more professional

Sell my townhouse

Start running again

Loose weight

Be a better husband and father.

Learn new tech and make something fucking awesome!

Go to tech Meetups

Hang around smart people and learn to be a better coder.

Battle my demons and autism.

I just spent 2 hours straight browsing for a new phone case and still haven't made up my mind. Why am I so indecisive!

"We need to have a meeting to clarify your role"

My head: Just give me a raise and then leave me alone

My mouth: Yea, sure. When works for you

Context:
My job is a little confusing.
My title on paper is support technician and I'm on the DevOps team but I have my own project to automate health checks. So most the accurate title for me would actually be Automation Developer Attached To [department name] DevOps

Trying to automate gitlab deployment with Ansible. It runs but freaking keeps failing on task. Reconfigure the gitlab server. Without helpful output!

After 2 days bashing and commenting line after line the answer reveals.

True != true Fuuucc...

I’ve spent 2 weeks trying to simply automate logging into my damn school’s blackboard but this ducking popup won’t freaking let me access it. I’ve tried selenium. I’ve used beautifulsoup and requests. I’ve even tried a tool called mechanize with python
But I’ve now realized I simply have no damn idea what I’m doing. I’ve read and tried way too many stack overflow articles and I’m just sick of this damn popup

If I can’t figure it out by the end of the upcoming thanksgiving break I’m dropping this damn project until I learn enough to utilize the blackboard API’s. I’m a little sure those will help

So I had been developing a real estate website and developing a MLS feed parser. I had only 1 year experience at that time and parsing a XML feed was already complex enough. On top of it, the client wanted to automate feed download from the MLS provider through HTTP authentication. Managed to do it. Everything worked for 15 days and on 16th day the property location markers stopped appearing on Google maps. Turned out that address to lat-long reverse geocoding was failing because API limit exhausted. My bad, I coded it on view instead of caching the lat-long in database. Fixed it in a day and viola!

When you create a script to automate something, and that one guy keeps estimating high on the task because he likes to do it manually and refuses to use it because "his way is simple and safer".

I feel like I would get more programming done if I would just stop trying to automate things...

!rant
Does anyone else derive great pleasure from creating quality of life/small utility programs?

So I'm learning python in between projects at work (plan on slowly moving new projects to it) and damn, my coding buddy and I have found a package/import for almost anything we can imagine. Heck, we canned ourselves laughing when we started googling random things and still found python packages that do it. I plan to use the language to automate a ton of things when I get a new PC.

Aside from that, I recently in 2 days (1 day building, 1 day bug fixing) made a tiny utility that shaves a good 5 minutes off a certain task for my colleagues at work, and in bulk use will save even more time. It's a textbox and a button only but it felt so nice to make something useful like that so quickly.

I'm tempted at some point to get a non-dev job. After about 2 weeks I could automate everything then just slack off.

Why do CEOs and higher ups always think development is just some easy quick thing you can spit out in a week? {
"I need a web app that can do X and I want to sell it to make more money!"
} or {
"I want something that can automate this thing here and then I can re-sell it!"
}

Usually, the project is something that already exists and has taken a whole team years to iron out and perfect and to compete with it would be insane or it exists and it's actually FOSS. We're a small MSP, we don't have the resources to make big ticket SELLABLE software.

Remote work as a sure thing. WFH 4EVER.

Currently I'm still not confident that most companies will keep or adhere to a remote-first culture because those are full of managers who can't see past their own insecurities.
We will probably see a wave of company failures and bankruptcies (sorry, I should have said "industry consolidation") in a few years while those few that managed to automate away their future-averse middle bosses take over the world.
The day you can't tell if your boss, that you only see in a Zoom window, is organic or a fully virtual #SFW #Professional interactive LinkedIn ad? That is the day I longe for.

When I was a high school, I did an internship at IT department for a local "center for student guidance".

The IT department consisted of one guy that started to automate everything the first year he worked there. He ended up being low on work and got flak from people above him for not working enough. He threw all his scripts away and the bosses/managers were happy he worked more... But his work was of course slower with more mistakes.

Also, he had an excel sheet of everyone username + password. The excel file was secured with a password. When he went to the coffee machine, he never locked his computer nor the spreadsheet.

Fuck Microsoft.

Laptop BSODs on me.

Azure deployment continuously times out.

Can't build a Power Automate Flow because of permissions and then it tells me the user doesn't exist when it does.

I have that idea about starting a non dev project, but use some dev skills.

I'm thinking about raising shrimps 🦐 to distribute (maybe at first just for testing). I can use raspberry pi with some sensors (Oxygen and food etc...) to semi-automate the raising process

Developing a web portal to handle college placements.
During the showcasing of the project ,this senior lecturer comes up to us and just when we started the explanation,he stops in mid sentence and asks "where is the artificial intelligence". When the entire portal was built to automate the process,he wanted some AI.
We were dumbstruck. The stupid expectations of senior faculty never cease to amaze me.

Not a rant, just another story about me and the man I'm gonna wife.

We both have an upcoming job interview, and I was just talking about how at our previous internship I was using python to automate some tedious tasks for me.
Me: it's like a general thing, right, to just automate things you don't really want to do
...
Me: like breathing, and waking up, ya know? I don't wanna do that shit
Him: it kind of already is automated.
Me: *three years of wasted time at med school come tumbling back in to my brain, suddenly recalling the brainstem*
Me: oh, yeah.

Deadline in 24 work hours, for a in-house product to automate payment processing.

Why in 24 hours you say? , Me and the accounting guy is going on vacation on Friday.

Will it go into production on Friday evening while I'm going through the door?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

apple is an IT company..

"New apps and app updates will not be accepted December 23–27 (Pacific Time), so any releases should be scheduled, submitted, and approved in advance."

Ah yes, because ofcourse the servers can go home and spend the holidays with their applets.

(yes i know apple says they verify by hand, yes i know in reality they actually automate it)

No time to waste, Let's Automate

I would want the super power to program myself and automate tasks, working out, talking to people, ruling a small third world country.

True reason of unemployment-

Firstly companies hire people to make their software automate and then after successful completion of the project, the company terminates most of the employees.

Hi friends and others. There is a task I want to automate. I want to convert .docx files to .pdf and then minify those. Are there JavaScript libraries or npm- packages which can do that? Because I would like to use Gulp or Webpack for this task. I would not mind if external APIs are involved, but I would rather not use those if not required.

Pls share your wisdom. Bye.

Automate in android is the best task automation tool, its very powerful and can do anything

except send a post request

I need you guys' help.
As mentioned earlier in one of my rants, I trade stocks part time, make a little money. But I am too tired from my full time work. So it is badly affecting my health. My broker is providing us with an API and docs at a monthly fee to develop software to automate trades.
I posted a job on Upwork, a few freelancers bid but their price was way beyond my budget.
Hence I decided to take up programming.

I was initially inclined towards C#, but seeing as how complex it is, I was thinking of going for python. Do you think it is a reasonable decision?

The ability to automate my day, create my own apps and modify open source ones to fit with my conditions :)

If I can’t find software I’m looking for it I don’t like the options I can just make it, it gives me the ability to automate tasks, it’s fun and it gives me a logical outlet.

We have a list of 1.5k different dependencies for various projects. And they wanted to check if each of those deps has been approved by the management.
They have no way to automate this. (I believe there is always a way to automate any fucking thing but my pm says there is no way)
And no employee in the company was keen to do this task so they decided to give it to interns.

Now I am sitting on my table, copying each and every dep, pasting in the browser (on their portal ) and noting down if it's approved. If it's not, I have to note the latest version that had been approved.

I have been doing this from morning. 400 done. 1000 to go.

fml

Started looking into ai. Now every time I talk to my friend about his job.

He stares at me like I'm about to automate his job away

I get really bored doing the same work again and again. I found that with programming/scripting I can automate boring stuff.

So now I spend twice the time doing a program to automate things. XD

Nowadays for my responsibilities all am thinking is maybe I can write a script for that

Slack or HipChat?

Using HipChat from last 1.5 years. We got many bots written for HipChat to automate process. So I think it's gonna be challenging to switch to slack.

happy new year! what do yall have planned for this year? I'm thinking about writing me up a miniature jarvis to automate my Web Development business, nothing really special just automated invoices, website installs, calendar, contract signing, etc. where all I have to do is type up a requirement list and code

less than a week into my new job I'm already writing shell scripts and python scripts to automate my tasks
- it's a windows machine
- Cannot install anything without admin privileges
- powershell is locked, cannot run scripts
- can't even change my wallpaper without privilages
thankfully git bash for windows runs without installation
python also runs without installation

Ok Visio. You have a Database Wizard that allows me to associate shapes with database records. Cool! You do not allow me to automate this through VBA? NOT COOL

Goddammit Google, SWIPE to automate an email response? I AM NOT A COG IN YOUR MACHINATIONS.

I am human! Flesh and blood! You reduce me to some variable in your algorithm and you ignore the very nuance that separates me from your cold unfeeling advertising factory.

I've been creating a new website layout for a small theatre group. I am like how it's coming together :)

It is designed with user interaction in mind because the layout they are using now is... Well, thrown together. It uses images as buttons and I had a few friends of mine ask "Where do I get tickets" and it is not updated regularly.

I plan to automate a few things like for shows, if the show date has passed, it will remove itself from the home page. I also plan to web scrape, if the site permits, some information to be displayed on the show page.

I got to lots to do before I can show them what I've made.

Worst: having to deal with "senior" unity devs who bullied me out of the company I was working in and who believe people should make ~200 lines of code functions cause "context switching is heavy on performances"

Best: i have started to automate a lot of stuff and to auto-generate definitions (e.g. keys for i18n) and can't really stop doing it anymore ☺️

Extra: stopping to care about the language and focussing a lot on approaches is also a thing I consider good about this year... Last time I was concerned with learning go, now i am more like: "how do I make this hot reload" or "how can I auto-generate routing if the configuration is default?"

I learned to code by trying too automate things. I started out with Windows batch and moved up to Java before I discovered the magic of C, C++, Python, and now Swift

I often enjoy thinking about how I could automate the people I work with 🤔

I started to learn programming to be liked by a girl and since then I periodically ask myself if this is really for me... And periodically, right as I start thinking it may not be for me, I find myself solving issues programming stuff, seeing parallelism between software development and anything and randomly toss out the classical: "you know, with and Arduino you could(...)" To people put of nowhere.

So yeah. Guess it's for me. I hate it but... Wait, I could automate my windows depending on the difference between internal and external temperature... Hmm... Later guys, got a project to deal with!

A platform that automate the payment of bills and worker's salaries through open banking.

A guy using our tool that automate rest api calls requests a feature to add the request body in the logs.
He was using “get” calls with no request body as a proof of missing feature.

The fuck? I'm trying to automate login for an asp.net website from a C# console app using HttpWebRequests. I used Fiddler to see how the login happens and how the browser obtains the session and auth cookies from the server. When I replicate the same procedure from C#, I am able to get both cookies withoth a problem, but when I try to use them to get data about the user, I get a 500 ISE. What the actual fuck? I've double-checked every single header and the URLs and it's doing literally the same thing as chrome: Get asp session id (POST)-> get an auth cookie (POST username and passwd) -> interact with the site using the session id and auth cookie (GET). And obiviously I don't have access to the server logs... :/

Real story:
Started fixing one file in one repo, build, doesn't build, go into other repo fix just one file there, but first I need to make myself a toolchain, making of toolchain fails because it depends on some dirty fix in the file I was fixing, refactor and clean that to a proper state, fuck yeah toolchain builds, source toolchain run make now, breaks with undefined reference, no time to debug plus fuck this automake, remove it, make a makefile, builds fuck yeah, shit now unittest are failing because why not, refactored that makefile as well, everything compiles, automate the test fully so that they are ran on the target out of make just because I'm a nice guy, fuck yeah everything works, commit this repo, commit other repo, review time, one of the guys gave up, the other one did it properly, found some shit there, fix that, done, merge, triggers CI fucking pass

All of this was done in 3h, Talk about efficiency

Been working on AWS for about 8 months. Always looked at Cloudformation like an Alien thing. Never thought I'd be the one diving into this Rabbit hole.

But now here I am, 3rd day, trying to Automate the whole infrastructure of my App via Cloudformation.

get to the office at 5:45AM to do a migration because the client doesnt want to automate it.. but pays extra for the inconvenience...

More than 50% of my work is due to the fact people don't do what they are suppose to do.

"Joe is suppose to submit report X every week. He hasnt been keeping up so make a script that reminds him if he's late. Better yet make a tool so Joe doesn't waste those 3 minutes every week."

Me: Tell him to do his job.

"But we need you to do it"

Me: Fine

"Suzie is complaining she does this menial task"

Me: She was hired to do that.

"Can we automate it?"

Me: No

"X is broken"

Me: I know. Group Y isn't doing what they are suppose to.

"Go talk to them so you can see why they aren't doing it. Then bend over backwards so you can handle these kinds of issues due to their laziness in the future."

Me: Fine...

you must repeat in order to automate

Automate stuff.

I automate whatever I can so that my lazy ass wouldn't forget about it.

One of the key person is asking every junior and senior person to build some program for her so she can automate those task.

Well everyone is just ignoring her. She never asked me. Which was kind of insulting for me and now I am thinking I should make that program and send her mail to buy it.

<<prev. #wk235 advices>>

~ Study the Error log deeply, Google each line if needed. Don't give up.
~ Learn by doing. Don't just read/watch.
~ Practice breaking down the problem statement first in different components and hierarchies. Don't jump into coding right away.
~ Write some, review some. Don't put off review for later.
~ Even if you don't exactly follow the best security practices - always ensure that your program is safe for use. Especially for user-inputs, etc, pay attention.
~ Never distribute code with passwords/keys written in it.
~ Don't hard code stuff, use Config file, environment variables, etc.
~ Try to automate repetitive stuff like build and deploy etc
~ Save and backup you code.
~ No one knows everything, also, today's knowledge gets outdated tomorrow. Continuous learning is synonymous with this field.

<<next #wk235 advices>>

Let's discover some Python stuffs tonight !

I think it's one of the best scripting language to automate easily boring tasks, am I right ?

Today is bad pun day it seems.

I'm working on a script to automate exporting PST files and Office Interop is being a pain. I tell my colleague @jacoKotze about my current issue and he just says "Maybe you just need a new Outlook on things"

When I found out that the app I have developed basically in my free time to automate most of the monotone tasks that were needed at my first job, was being sold to customers as utility tool for our devices without me getting even a penny extra!

Every other week I'll be doing something dumb (think, writing an essay), and I'll say "This is so monotonous, surely I can automate it!" Then I get really excited, for about twelve seconds before I remember that it's not gonna happen

Anything that I can make a computer do but can't because my boss doesn't think it's a good use of my time...

I have a lot of those now but can't automate them because.... I'm too busy dealing with them...

My project manager wants to automate a task. We tried to estimate how much time we would save... It is the full 5 minutes in a year (excluding time needed to update said script & append new functionalities)

Efficiency 101

I did not think that making a serverless Discord bot would be such a learning experience. The code itself was easy. The hard part was the infrastructure, because I decided to automate it all with Terraform and deploy it on AWS.

Before this project, I had no idea how API Gateways worked. Now I still have very little idea how they work but I managed to build one anyway. Eventually. And then I had to figure out how to automate the deployment of a lambda layer and function that would both still be managed in the Terraform state, with any code changes triggering a rebuild and update for the resource.

And then I had to untangle a dependency mess because API Gateways have some weird issues where two resources that have no explicit dependencies on each other will throw an error if they don't deploy in the right order.

And then I went the wrong way with Github actions trying to conditionally chain multiple workflows together before I realized I could just put multiple jobs with conditions in a single workflow.

And now after all that work over the course of 2 days, I have a bot that does this:

If I ever got a job and they mainly make me use Excel for whatever reason I’m just writing a python script to do whatever they’re asking me to do then just do whatever the rest of the day.

Installing phpBB 3.0.5 (from 2009) because of reasons.
This thing has no rest API, if I want to automate it I have to implement my own .. fun :)

Most of the faculty on my college's IT engineering department aren't exactly adept with Linux, despite the fact that 10/12 labs in our building run on Ubuntu.

Last week, a really great professor (who doesn't take any classes I can attend) from the Electronics and Communications department and I wrote some bash scripts to automate updates and so on, staying back after college until late evening to try to get the PCs updated.

We'll be trying to use SSH to update as many computers as we can remotely, and trying to learn to use Cron to automate the whole updating deal.
I'm learning this stuff on the side, since it's not on my syllabus at all, and the professor isn't even related to the departments that run the labs usually.

We're not getting anything for doing this, the head of my department (who has it in for me) has no idea about this, and nobody else is bothered enough to learn either.

okay. Just had an interview for a web application engineer role. It was a catastrophe. Basically, they are taking care only of things I was never worked with, like certification management, ansible deployments, bash scripting. ?? What? Like, what the hell? Guys, I can make you a nice javascript game, or laravel website, eventually mount the routers and switches, configure and automate the networks, but certs... for me ssl is just an extra checkbox when I'm buying a new domain. I asked the recruiter like 5 times, please tell me what the hell is the role about, he doesn't knew... I think, I'll just give up this applying for a jobs stuff, and stay maintenance engineer, dig into plc-s and etherCat even more and forget the IT career completely...

Looking at vacancies and the JS build tools asked (Babel, Gulp) and then visiting their websites I notice that I don't understand what they are going on about.

"Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines."

What the actual corpo fuck?

The "get started" page expects you already know npm, typescript, and when you look at their pages, well... Where does the circlejerk end and the actual Javascript start?

I've been out of the corporate loop for a few years, seems it's all about build tools these days. I need to get out of this industry pronto.

It feels like this year, I haven't been motivated to build my own apps. At most I make a few fixes to plugins that broke due to HTML layout changes but I haven't built any full apps...

Just feels like I don't have anymore problems that annoy me so much I want to solve/automate away...

There is one minor one actually but it's just a redesign/extension of an existing app I wrote awhile back...

My worst fight with a dev was definitely that time I tried to break the mould and build this incredibly tedious VB app to automate data handling through Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The other dev always said "you can do this" and "come on, it's not rocket science" and I was always like "yeah, dude, sure, but can you help me with this bit here, please, I'm so stuck on it?" He'd be all like "ofc bro, I got your back", but when it came to the actual work that needed to be done, he was all silent. Needless to say, now I have a rubber ducky to help me with my dev needs, as talking to myself felt like a nightmare. Guess that's what other people feel like when I strike up a conversation with them, too.

I have to go through roughly 700 data entries and adjust the system's data accordingly ... by hand.😑
We don't have the tools to automate this reliably, the only available tool, tells you that an error occured and what happened but not where. That would've been kinda helpful...
The problem is that the respective data object of the data entry often contains a phone number, which has to be in a standardized format ... which it is not. Every number is formatted in like 10 variations!? A dozen different separators like spaces, commas, slashes and hyphens. And it must be edited manually 😖
My solution: built a goddamn chrome extension to format the string on click. Done. Saves a few seconds each time and a lot of headache in future. Of course given the correctness of the extension.

!rant, but let me tell you this

I wanted to automate some tasks in work, because it started to be a pain in the ass, manually copying those assets took me between 30 - 50 min

let me see, I always wanted to check out python so I started to copy paste some code together, editing it and after a few hours all I know I have a tool which logs in to our work CMS download and unpacks a zip archive, creates a backup from the old files in the repository and moves the files I just downloaded in the repo, I put this in a loop for our twenty languages (websites) and its done

Im amazed, I never picked up a language this easy to use

I've started my business in amazon with dropshipping. And I'm using the dropshipping tool extension which simply makes .csv file with computed prices and things from the product search I've made in amazon. But still I have to check all the products one by one and delete the ones which are not eligible for selling. And it takes like 1 hours for 100-150 products and after that I only have 3 or 4 products left.
So I've made a program to automate this by taking the csv file and checking the products itself and deleting not eligible products . And now I'm thinking of selling it. Is it better to sell it with monthly plan like $4/month or to sell it for $50?

So there is this website called 100daysofrunning.in one of the worst design seen ever. They've a submit page which is another app that opens in an iframe.
If you're part of challenge, everyday you've to submit a form. Distance, time, Strava link, date and it's a pain to do so every day.
On the 50th day they restricted the date to7 days, so you cannot post data older then 7 days.
Being a programmer it would have been insult had i entered data manually.
Thanks to casperjs, meteorjs i was able to automate fetch from strava and post on this dumb page.
One day due an error, the script failed and I've missed one day of data entry. That's 2km of running gone invain and I'm out of the challenge.
Programming has mad me lazy. Screw programming. I should've been a dumb idiot to manually add data spending fkin 30 mins, atleast life would be simple.

GDPR:
My Pokemon Go account, wired to my gmail got banned. (My fault, I am programmer and lazy person, my inner nature is to automate things. )

So if I go by GDPR I can tell them to delete my account and register with same mail again?

In this example I'll obviously lose the progress but the account can be reused and with some services this could lead to more interesting outcomes.

Automate is a great app...
(Scroll to last paragraph for a question if you wanna skip the faff)

Semi addicted to a time waster mobile game that has micro transactions. Yet you can get free ingame currency by watching ads over and over.

Using automate i managed to 'automate' the process of "watch add. Click ok. Repeat"

Now when i sleep or idle ill just let it rake up some cash. Sadly it isnt full proof as sometimes (1 out of 20 times) it fails to run the ad and that breaks ot all. But restsrting it is easy and thats another 20 cash!

What have you done to skip tedious work for something trivial or some trivial gain but felt good you did it anyways?

I spent most of the first half of the year writing an app that talks to an API that a vendor custom-made for us, to automate the opening of vendor hardware replacement tickets. It went live yesterday on the vendor's side, and I began 13 days of PTO today. Rather than go full-on with it, I handed it to three engineers to test it while I'm gone and document their experience. Preliminary results have been very good. I figured that would be the smartest way to handle my absence and still get some valuable work done with it.

But I'm going out of my mind! I want feedback now! I want to work more on it! All I can do is keep a list of fixes and improvements and stare blankly at it until after my vacation is over. My mind is still wedged firmly in the backend. Must relax!

Anyone using Huawei Cloud? How good is it? Does it have APIs to automate the infra creation and all?

I wanted to automate the install of a toolchain which had just a manual install script. Piped `yes` into the installer and it worked just fine. Only downside, it always installs to 'y' 😅

I would like to learn how to better automate workflows. I find it fascinating that you can control one program with another. Especially GUI apps. I have automated apps before to reduce human error and boring data entry work. It would be amazing to take this to a new level. Perhaps even automate specific programming work.

Machines programming machines would be fascinating as well.

Just finished the testing of the first script I wrote at work to automate a vital task that had to be carried out manually on a daily basis.

It feels so damn good to know that the whole process is free from the variable of human error.

had my boss ask me to automate reports on our emails... he wanted me to use google script. the 6min limit was killing me. we needed up sacrificing accuracy and going another route with VBA done by my co worker. I have a meeting next week with my boss's boss about how we did it and I don't know VBA.

Here are some:
1. email filters for crap
2. know wtf is your current task and stay on it with minimal context switch
3. get a bot to automate some of your work (build, deploy, health, run tests) inside slack/rocket.chat/otjer-irc-like-software

Recently I've been noticing bugs in software products I use and I can't help but report them! For open-source software I sometimes even try to dig around the source code, out of curiosity.

I'm looking to learn a thing or two about automating stuff with python. Any cool ideas you guys have that I should implement?