Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work?
Hey guys: I’m starting to realize that a sizable chunk of my work is actually quite repetitive. For instance, I’d have to log into GCloud console every once in a while to check if I still have enough credits… Do you guys have these repetitive tasks at work? I’m thinking of using coding up some automation scripts and I’d love to see where else people might use it on!
PS: what kind of jobs do you guys do? I’m a software engineer at a small startup
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You don't stand up every now and then to stretch your legs?
You don't take a sip of coffee or tea or water periodically?
You don't ever run out of ink or pens or paper and have to get new ones?
You don't ever check your email or flip through math journals looking for interesting new papers being published?
You don't ever turn on a computer or turn it off/put it to sleep?
These are all repetitive tasks and I have a hard time imagining you do none of them or anything like them in your work life.
You don't refresh HN ever to see if there are new stories related to your pure math?
You don't ever type your ideas into a document and email it to someone?
You don't ever log in to any financial account to view balances?
You don't ever check your phone to see if someone has texted or if there is an important message waiting?
You don't ever spin a pen on your fingers while you think?
You don't ever pace around while thinking?
You don't ever have something online you have to manually log into to check for work? Vacation days? Researcher collaborations? Grant results? Nothing?
You don't have to get gas to fill up your car tank? Do you work remotely? You don't have to check the bus schedule or wait for the subway? Doing the same thing every day that doesn't really require your mental energy - like filling up your tank of gas on the way to work - is something I would call repetitive.
You don't ever click on links to open video chats or type in phone numbers to make phone calls?
Well your first batch, you added more after I commented.
The answer 'none' is just condescending to the point of silly and it's obviously not true. I'm hoping to illuminate how there are repetitive patterns in everyone's life. Even 'pure math researchers'.
Sorry if some of my guesses were not in line with the question directly.
I honestly don't believe that there are people with 0 repetitive tasks in their lives that could see no improvements with software (or hardware?). It's just not possible.
If you were being sarcastic and intentionally telling me to stop being creative and thinking big-picture, please don't do that. I hate when HN just shuts down all creative thinking with sarcastic laughter.
I don't see breathing as a tedious repetitive task because it happens mostly automatically and can be done in parallel with other work quite easily. But I could be wrong and I suppose there's room for improvement there too. CO2 detectors and air quality monitors in meeting rooms - as a standard - would likely boost productivity and reduce other tedious work as employees will be able to breathe easier (with better knowledge about CO2 in the office, more efforts for improved ventilation would likely happen).
> 'What repetitive tasks do you do?'
> 'None. I'm in pure math'
...just seems snarky and condescending. I'm listing real problems that most people have, that are indeed repetitive, mostly work-related, and could have solutions (at least partial solutions).
Of course, I'm still trying to find a good solution for printing those QR codes. Printers suck and printing labels is it's own special kind of hell.
Fairly quickly, one might find that all requests are repetitive. It can be quite productive, professionally, to just assume that whatever you're asked to do, will be asked for again, and to learn how to pre-empt those requests by writing the first solution directly as automation code.
It doesn't have to be rocket science. Just keeping all the interesting bits in variables is the first 50% of automation.
You can become known as a miracle worker fairly quickly by just keeping a "commonplace book" of old one-off scripts, quickly found, in a personal git repo. Keep the company secrets left out to protect your skin, but a manager is often very quick to notice the person who can almost instantly replicate a previous request.
Having those snippets available also cross-pollinates - how many times have you repurposed one script into another? Careful now, once in a great while those turn into money making products, especially when the unrelated ones are hooked together.
These days, my little snippets are largely the boring, gross parts that act as the heavy barriers to automation - learning the URL endpoints for automation, learning the automation types, just getting a session that can do work. From there, the base case often yields a full strategy with another 10% of the work - modern APIs are so good you can generally just guess what is required and half the time it works without reading the docs.
Try coding it up. Worst case, you learn, best case, you invent a company. Middle of the road, though, you end up being a few people's go-to person, a wonderful place to be in this increasingly competitive world.
Im a contractor so what i do is, "What do you need done?".
Then I taught my colleague how to use the tool.
I will say for me I spend probably too long opening a series of programs and getting set up before I can work. I believe there is software for this, but my dream is to have it simple and customizable by project. I would love to be able to open everything to the right directory and the right apps for working on different projects, or adjust the ones I need at any time based on being at a different point in the project.
All told this is just a few minutes every morning, but always a minor annoyance.
I agree this sounds trivial, but the overhead of getting my multi-monitor setup just right when switching to a new service in the codebase is enough to kill flow.
PS: Don't do this without battery/ups fallback.
Someone just released an app for macOS to solve this problem [1].
[1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/workspacepro
* creating a json for meeting notes from a template based on the type of meeting (1on1, mentorship, some project, etc), that includes action items and other relevant metadata from the last meeting of that type with that person/group * creating a todoist item for a particular project * killing any running processes that match a particular string * various git hooks for linting or mirroring changes between GitHub and bitbucket * scraping the AKC website to see if there are any new puppy litters listed for the particular kind of dog I’m looking for, and emailing the results to myself and my girlfriend * loading a particular subset of deidentified prod data into my local db for dev work * adding/enabling openssh to a docker container to be able to use a remote ssh interpreter
But in general, something I heard a while ago in reference to finding niche work when contracting as a dev in an industry that you might be unfamiliar with is “find what people are using excel for, and automate it”.
https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu
In a nutshell it is a macro recorder for the web browser (Open-Source browser extension for Chrome and Firefox).
My typical daily flow is usually like so:
- Check email, slack, etc. and respond
- Review PR
- Test PR
- Respond to PR
- Review case requirements
- Respond to case requirements
- Write code for case
- Test code for case
- Create PR
Some of my coworkers use AutoHotkey for automating common tasks, but I don't feel like I'd save that much time by using that. I probably waste the most time waiting for builds, which can take up to 20 seconds. I tend to lose focus when I have to wait for things, which probably impacts my productivity.
I don't really do a lot of repetitive tasks. This is something that I really like about being a software developer. If I had a task that was annoyingly repetitive, I'd automate it myself.
I have to format my daily work log two different ways, one in a PDF and one in a word document.
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/167263/how-to-conver...
And yes, I do know about pandoc.
Apart from that, no not really. I guess that’s the perk of working at a small company. One day I’m DevOps, the next I’m Front End, the next DBA etc.