[HN Gopher] My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with auto...
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My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
Author : conoro
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-02-07 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tines.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tines.com)
| nescioquid wrote:
| By all means, learn to automate ditch-digging. That is certainly
| useful. If it's also your job, perhaps you'll notice there's just
| a higher-order ditch to be dug. If so, what's the next move?
| Automate the automation of the ditch-to-be-dug, or start writing
| a blog about first-order ditch-digging automation? Or shill for a
| company who furnishes ditch-digging tools?
|
| In which case, I'd suggest learning how to write in a way that
| doesn't channel Dan Brown blog-shit (section header every two
| paragraphs vs. two-to-three pages a chapter). Or learn to write
| ad copy, or talk about using VAX systems to fill out the preamble
| to your chili recipe. Even failing that, I suppose you've reached
| your no-code solution out of ditch-digging.
| mromanuk wrote:
| I read it happily waiting for the aha moment until the very end,
| where I realized that it was just an adpost for a new
| ifttt/transform tool with a glaze of "low code is the future"
| (All that for just $30k/year)
| ents wrote:
| $30k/year?!
| _pdp_ wrote:
| I feel that all workflow tools are simply lacking in terms of
| capabilities. Sure, the base-cases are covered but when it comes
| to something remotely useful it is best to be implemented with
| real code. That being said, I think there is certainly a need for
| some low-code tools where your requirement is simply basic
| automation and service plumbing, as long as it is not mission
| critical, i.e. take value from system A and put in system B.
|
| For example, do you really want to implement the entire Slack
| interactive callback workflow for displaying a simple dialog to a
| user? I guess not. I workflow will do a much better job at that
| sort of problems.
|
| That being all said, I don't think tines does a particularly good
| job at this because it simply chains a number of HTTP requests.
| Some of these APIs require special care and HTTP simply does not
| cut it.
| bikingbismuth wrote:
| I once had to implement SOAR in a "no code" automation solution
| (it was not Tines), and it was terrible. There were a lot of
| connectors and transformers, but almost all of them had some
| weird quirks that made them hard to use effectively. Coming from
| an "all code" background I was pulling my hair out trying to
| troubleshoot everything. The project was sufficiently onerous
| that I actually left my job over it.
| rtkaratekid wrote:
| I had to do this too. I eventually learned I could write python
| plug-ins and started writing the workflows that way instead.
| But then it exposed to me how actually unwieldy the api was and
| I was extremely unhappy with the work. I would automated
| everything myself, without the framework, but the platform was
| in part there to help those who lacked the technical skills to
| do everything from a terminal etc. I hear they're still
| fighting with it even months after I left the job.
| jhot wrote:
| I used to consult in the document capture space (OCR,
| classification, data extraction) and one company I worked for
| wanted to sell UiPath. I showed them how I could do all of that
| in code (even built a wrapper around AutoHotkey for Windows UI
| interaction) with way less time, effort, and hair pulling. They
| said it wouldn't sell because businesses think they can have
| someone implement a low code solution and they'll take it over
| eventually, and a significant portion of their revenue is from
| licenses.
|
| I luckily no longer consult and now am an automation engineer
| for a company and I get to build things the way I want. So far
| a lot of Go and a little bit of Node and things are great. I'll
| take that any day over "We sell X, so you use X for
| everything."
|
| That said, for home automation I do use Node Red and absolutely
| love it. The integration with Home Assistant is top notch and
| prototypes and tweaks take no time at all. It's much more like
| functional programming than a lot of low code tools and the
| function node allows for whatever JS you want. So if I need to
| do something complicated that would take a ton of individual
| nodes and spaghetti to work natively, I can just drop in some
| code and move on.
| a_brawling_boo wrote:
| Here is a related story. I should mention Tines or OP has no
| relationship I know of with Salesforce, for background Mulesolft
| is a cloud focused integration platform owned by Salesforce,
| who's big feature is visual mapping, visual workflows, etc. (of
| course it is more complex than this, read up if you are
| interested):
|
| I attended another meetup/training, Mulesoft was really pushing
| their web only visual workflow/mapping tool. And the instructor
| goes over the entire song and dance, and I said to him, that I
| was having real difficulty even understanding what type of
| problem this tool would be good for in a real-world situation.
| And he takes his glasses off and says to a room full of maybe 30
| or 40 developers, that this tool they had been pushing so hard
| should NEVER be used in production, its only real use was for
| sale demos and maybe, maybe, doing some sort of POC which would
| need to be reproduced in 'code' at a later time. He used weasel
| words to say all of this of course, but his meaning was clear.
| This was 2018~2019, not the stone ages. So, I wasted that evening
| (there would be more) going to a sales enablement seminar billing
| itself a developer learning workshop.
| Jedd wrote:
| > My main issue with Node-RED is that I have to install, run and
| maintain it myself. There have been times when I've forgotten
| which Raspberry Pi it was running on and I've re-flashed the SD
| card!
|
| Installing Node-RED is a low-effort task. Setting up backups of
| your flows is a tad more effort, but plenty of documentation
| around this. It also does IMAP, I believe. In an article
| bemoaning vendor abandonment syndrome, something free that runs
| on your own equipment, is a feature.
|
| A post-it note would be a cheaper solution to that second
| problem.
| balaji1 wrote:
| You could seek automate-able repetitive work and not have to
| dodge said repetitive work.
| nefitty wrote:
| I have had a lot of fun and success with Keyboard Maestro for Mac
| and Shortcuts for iOS. For my work, I try to automate Terminal
| commands. I also dabbled a little with bash scripts. I love that
| Shortcuts lets me think programatically and flex those muscles
| for fun tasks.
|
| Here's some stuff I have set up:
|
| Mac:
|
| - I use several displays, and don't usually use the built-in
| monitor. I have an automation that dims it until it turns off.
|
| - I have recurring KM script that deletes Yarn and NPM caches.
| They get huuuuge.
|
| - I have a bash script that shows me the temperature of my Mac. I
| might be able to add an alert if the temp goes above x.
|
| iOS:
|
| - I hooked up my Pavlok shock bracelet to Reminders. I get a
| percentage chance of getting shocked every 15mins if tasks aren't
| done. The more tasks done, the less likely it is.
|
| - Shortcut to pull up Youtube videos for PiP without a Youtube
| Premium account. You can find that online. Game changer.
|
| - Sci-Hub and Meta.org search shortcuts made available in the
| share menu. You can get my Sci-Hub shortcut here (a good starting
| point for other search shortcuts):
| https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub-mirrors
|
| - To help me debug shortcuts, I created a logger that writes to
| Data Jar or to a Note. Helps soo much. I haven't released it but
| you can get my Twitter at the link above if you're interested.
|
| Node dev:
|
| - Semantic commit template accessible through Dash's text-
| expander
|
| - Next.js sucks but I made some scripts to automate that work. I
| had to use a Chrome-watcher that let's me refresh specific tabs
| from the command line.
|
| There's many more. I wanted to share mine to maybe give you an
| idea of what tools to check out and what to automate to
| approximate your robotic luxury communist future.
| mercwear wrote:
| From the outside looking in Tines looks to be a less feature rich
| and much more expensive version of Zapier (almost like a VC had
| the idea of building a Zapier clone and slapping a ridiculous
| price on it along with some "security" verbiage to spur the
| interest of larger businesses who see a $99/mo product and
| instantly believe it's not enterprise ready).
|
| I do not see a way to automate most of my side projects given the
| free plan limitations and for an individual the pricing is a non-
| starter.
| Mandatum wrote:
| The UX of Tines beats the pants off ALL of their competitors.
| They're just too expensive.
|
| I've tried them all.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| These comments all present valid reasons why low-code is usually
| a nightmare. To me, the most egregious offender is vendor lock-
| in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in.
|
| It's all fine and dandy if you found a low-code solution that
| works for you, as long as you're comfortable paying a premium to
| pigeon hole yourself with that solution for the unforeseeable
| future, with no guarantees that you won't get royally screwed by
| some combination of planned obsolescence, feature deprecation, or
| the success of the company whose low-code product you are using.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| Vendor lock-in is not always a problem. Imagine that you have a
| situation where you can either throw one engineer at it to
| create a custom solution or buy an existing one that locks you
| into their service offering? What would you choose? It is not
| always clear-cut, but it is better to buy simply because
| employees are not permanent in most cases. After they leave,
| there will be zero support.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I wasn't paying proper attention on first click and thought I was
| on [ny]ti _m_ es.com
|
| The sales push felt very odd from that perspective, and the free
| tier of 3(!) is my non-starter.
| Axsuul wrote:
| Had anyone tried out https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
|
| Also a Zapier competitor but self-hosted
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I've used it a fair amount. Some cool features for sure. I love
| how you can copy and paste workflows from their docs / forum.
|
| For some reason I can never fully grok how data is moved around
| from node to node. (Or at least remember when I come back after
| many months)
|
| (e.g.: items[0].json.data)
|
| The problem I have with it, is just not enough integrations.
| That's really the secrete sauce behind zapier. They have _so
| many_ integrations with a million different services.
| Mandatum wrote:
| Yes. If you're a developer that's done a fair amount of
| automation, Python and the like are easier for batch or timed
| tasks. Having said that, I still use n8n for running event
| based source stuff which might still feed into a script. I also
| use it when I want a GUI instead of working out the "best"
| library and no HTTP API exists that I export by relocating
| requests from my browser (I'm looking at you all those devs
| moving to WS).
|
| I just wish its main configuration/scripting language wasn't
| JavaScript. If it was agnostic and I could drop-down to
| something else that would be great.
|
| The Docker and packaged Apps they provide are excellent
| starting points.
| dapids wrote:
| No, but thanks for the link.
| ziggus wrote:
| This was a pretty interesting adicle until the sales started in
| earnest. Tines looks mildly interesting, but it's wildly
| expensive and the community edition isn't available on-premises,
| so it's a hard pass from me. Plus, I'm immediately skeptical of
| any company that crows about anything Gartner-related.
| sockpuppet69 wrote:
| aspyct wrote:
| lol, didn't expect that kind of pricing.
| nyx wrote:
| This article is a lengthy preamble to an advertisement for a SaaS
| product, but I'm thankful you at least get to a conclusion before
| the evangelism begins: there's a basic pattern here, i.e. "get
| data from X, transform it, and put it in Y", and the tools,
| systems, and platforms listed are all solutions to the same basic
| problem.
|
| I'm sure there's a use case and a market for this product, but
| I'd wager that I'm not alone among the HN audience in thinking
| that I'd rather have a couple shell scripts in a Docker container
| on my own hardware or whatever than spend a bunch of money
| irreversibly trapping my automations in some proprietary cloud-
| hosted thing where they can be held ransom come the renewal date.
| [deleted]
| gorjusborg wrote:
| What saves me the most time is not "automation" but something I
| call "Don't waste time learning things that are likely to go
| away".
|
| So yeah, I'll just leverage the skills I've leveraged over and
| over to make a living.
| randito wrote:
| That's a really interesting point.
|
| This seems to explain a skepticism that I have, with regards
| to new tools, new languages, and especially "a new [x] that
| will solve all your problems."
| Ma8ee wrote:
| And that basic pattern is usually called Extract, Transform and
| Load (ETL) and there are numerous implementations. Some
| respectable Open Source ones too.
| biellls wrote:
| I think there's space for an open source library that can help
| with what you described by using just python and YAML. We
| originally created https://github.com/typhoon-data-org/typhoon-
| orchestrator to orchestrate ETL workflows, which would be a
| superset of the use cases you described. Our next goal is to
| allow deployment to AWS lambda which can be a good compromise
| between getting locked in with SAAS and hosting your own
| infrastructure.
|
| Also check out Zappa's scheduled tasks that have a similar goal
| and inspired our library. We used it initially as a backbone
| and ran into a series of issues that forced us to write our own
| version of it, but depending on your goals it could be enough.
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