[HN Gopher] The Art of Automation
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The Art of Automation
Author : asicsp
Score : 67 points
Date : 2020-09-26 12:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jessfraz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jessfraz.com)
| iamwil wrote:
| I started curating a bunch of automation stories, use-cases, and
| ideas at https://automationcookbook.io. It is usually more
| business process automation, rather than personal automation,
| though.
| Dolios wrote:
| An improved timeGained equation.
|
| timeGained = (manualTimeSpent * n) - (timeToAutomate)
| tuatoru wrote:
| Randall Munroe has done at least two cartoons about this.
|
| My own experience has led me to the point where if I'm thinking
| about automating something, I stop and ask "is there a way that
| this can be done away with completely?"
|
| The most reliable, easiest to maintain scripts are those with
| zero lines of code. They also perform best and consume least
| resources.
|
| With a bit of thought and/or flexibility in how things are
| achieved, it's surprising how often this question produces a good
| result.
| jka wrote:
| Your comment predicts the next few waves of no/low-code
| automation, I think.
|
| Early phases will involve the introduction of no/low-code
| automations that integrate existing APIs, services, and systems
| within businesses for the purposes of automating existing
| processes.
|
| That's good for the APIs, systems and automation platforms
| because they become essential and encumbent components of
| operating those businesses.
|
| The later, and I suspect much longer, phases will involve
| identification of business processes that aren't really needed
| and that can be removed by thinking about the ways that
| organizations function in entirely new ways, or that can be
| streamlined.
|
| By that point some of the integrations may have become so
| baked-in that they'll require significant maintenance to
| update. And as we see with some cloud-based IoT devices, it's
| possible for service providers to encounter outages or cease
| operating, in which case internal businesses processes may
| halt.
|
| All this is similar to the gradual automation and improvement
| of physical assembly lines; it's a case of applying the same
| principles to organizations. And yep, the cheapest, most
| efficient and reliable component is one that doesn't have to
| exist.
| mathattack wrote:
| This is an old idea in the quality movement. Reducing
| unnecessary steps improves both speed and quality.
| tyingq wrote:
| This certainly holds true for a lot of approval workflows. I've
| been in big companies where my ~$300 Visio purchase flowed to a
| VP for approval. They could have easily done an auto-approve
| based on job title. It's not like the VP, who had hundreds of
| people on his team, would know if I needed it or not.
| codegladiator wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1319/
|
| https://xkcd.com/1205/
| rubin55 wrote:
| A thing I usually find lacking in others' "automate-all-the-
| things" scripts/apps/pipelines/etc is documentation. Without good
| documentation you only temporarily kept time-consuming
| chaos/manual-labor at bay at the cost of more complexity/entropy
| in the future. In my opinion, without docs, it eventually becomes
| a burden on (future) colleagues instead of a nicely consistent
| automated-away process. Don't automate (just) for yourself,
| automate for others, where docs empower others to be autonomous
| and able to manage said automation without your head around.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I agree documentation is super important! It's I recently
| started at a new company and have again been implementing the
| framework described in Manual Work is a Bug[1], summarized as:
|
| 1) Document the Steps 2) Create Automation Equivalents 3)
| Create Automation 4) Self-Service and Autonomous Systems
|
| When I started going through stuff with my coworker, I made a
| Word document with bullets and sub-bullets for all the steps in
| a process. When they unexpectedly needed to take a week leave
| of absence a month into the job, I was able to complete
| _almost_ every routine part of the job. It took a ton of stress
| off of them!
|
| Across all my professional jobs, I find #1 to be the hardest.
| My process is to write down the high-level steps, then strictly
| follow the documentation next time I do the process, adding
| more and more detail every time.
|
| Once it's decently documented, I record how long each step
| takes, and add comments like "This needs to be better
| documented" or "This is the most tedious step, and would be
| pretty simple to automate". Timing each step lets me start and
| complete something between meetings, filling in gaps.
|
| Overall I've found the system to be really helpful. It makes
| transitioning job duties to new employees trivial and has saved
| me literally hundreds of hours over just a few years in the
| professional workforce.
|
| [1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520
| dgudkov wrote:
| Good point. EasyMorph (I'm the founder) auto-generates human-
| readable HTML documentation on workflows in plain English. It's
| not perfect, but not bad either.
|
| https://easymorph.com
| summitsummit wrote:
| assuming in a capitalist society, this is not a choice that
| maximizes roi
| monkeydust wrote:
| Been on an automation drive during lockdown.
|
| Highly recommend Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
| (https://amzn.to/3mVuKSx) if you are interested in automation +
| coding (from beginner level).
|
| Have automated banking tasks and programmatically getting
| information from the internet (aka scrapping).
|
| Amazing what you can do with python libraries - beautiful soup,
| selenium...
| asicsp wrote:
| ATBS is also free to read online [0] and the author has
| _automated_ to provide free coupons [1] (applicable during
| first week of a month) for the online course on udemy
|
| I'd also suggest realpython [2] for resources on web scraping
|
| [0] https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/
|
| [1] https://inventwithpython.com/automateudemy
|
| [2] https://realpython.com/tutorials/web-scraping/
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > Time is one of the most valuable resources in the world. If
| there was something you could do to free more time for yourself,
| why wouldn't you?
|
| You can automate a task and thereby cause the task to happen
| without your involvement, but that doesn't give you more time. It
| just automates a task.
|
| The amount of time you have is still that which happens between
| being born and dying.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It is defined in the article what she means by it. time gained
| = (time doing task manually)-(time to automate task)
| wombatmobile wrote:
| What you are describing is experiential change. Instead of
| feeling beholden to a task, which in your equation is
| negative time, automation frees you to have opportunity for
| other activities that you might experience as positive time.
|
| Another way to view these experiences is that they all take
| place in the finite amount of time that you have here on
| Earth. That time doesn't change. Only your experience of it
| changes.
|
| You can control your experiences by cultivating your
| thoughts.
|
| For example, you might enjoy the time it takes you to design
| and build a system for automating a task. Contrast that
| experience with that of somebody who hates the idea of doing
| work to automate a task, and would rather just get the task
| over and done with, and never consider automation.
|
| Who is right, and who is wrong?
|
| You could calculate an answer by applying your maths, and
| that would be one answer, which might come out in your
| favour, or might not, depending on whether you could automate
| a task in less time than it would take to perform the task.
|
| But you already know that you're coming out ahead, even if it
| takes you 10 times longer to design and implement the
| automation than it does to perform the task manually, because
| you enjoy the process of automating tasks. That's because
| you've cultivated your thoughts.
| samus wrote:
| > But you already know that you're coming out ahead, even
| if it takes you 10 times longer to design and implement the
| automation than it does to perform the task manually,
| because you enjoy the process of automating tasks. That's
| because you've cultivated your thoughts.
|
| This is only true under the assumption that people automate
| stuff for fun. Businesses have a different incentive. They
| want automation to enable their pricey employees to take
| care of more tricky tasks, or to simply require fewer of
| them in the first place. A business won't give leave to
| their employees to automate processes just because they
| enjoy automating stuff.
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