[HN Gopher] My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with auto... ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-07 23:00 UTC)