HACKER Q&A
📣 qrt

If you could automate one thing you do often at work, what would it be?


Hello HN!

We're currently working on a work automation platform. We have a few capabilities that we're building to help you do your work better. For guidance it would be super helpful to hear directly from the HN crowd :)

Please do comment below about one thing you'd like to see automated. Would super awesome if you could complete this quick 1-min survey: https://bit.ly/2MjN6fd

Many thanks!

  👤 sheeeep86 Accepted Answer ✓
It's not fully automate, but I frequently find myself having to do a lot of one off shell tasks, which are not quite worth the effort of writing a bash script. While some command is running I would like to start enqueing the next command.

Technically I could write one command like this and go get a coffee:

cd dir1 && task1 && cd ../dir2 && task2 some arg && etc

But then the task would only start executing when I'm done typing all commands... I want it to start task1 right away and then tkae my time to enter the rest...

👤 lowdose
Acquiring knowledge. Auto flash card question generation based on the things I read, listen and watch.
👤 arsenide
We have many software programs that need to be run in sequence to transform a set of data from one form (on the order of tens to hundreds of GB) into a bunch of different output file formats. At some points the tools need to be run linearly, and at other points there are a few tools that need to be run in a branched fashion and then their outputs are combined in some complicated way using the next tool. Some of these tools take on the order of up to days to run, so an improper configuration due to human error loses time (pretty common given the complexity of work). Often the time lost is on the order of days.

These tools need to be configured in certain ways depending on the business needs.

Having a nice way to look at the dataflow as a whole, configure these tools on a global level within some framework, and be able to nicely distribute the work on our internal server farm would be worth a good bit of money to the company.

👤 quickthrower2
Refactoring. I’m sure there could be more advanced refactoring available than rename and extract method.
👤 protoweek
Figure out all the things I need to read and summarise it for me... tab switching, reading, skimming take up a lot of my time

Many channels on slack + email threads + conversations on DMs

👤 opportune
heres a potentially easy one: create a tool that behaves exactly like outlook rules to the user but can be applied to gmail

I spend too much time looking at email and can’t seem to get the hang of the gmail labels system

👤 pks016
Not related to software.

I have to feed and give fresh & vitamin water to birds almost everyday. I wish, I could automate that somehow.

👤 powerbottle
Does code review and keeping up with code reviews count? I find that I can review PRs from multiple teams in a day and keeping up with them all of them is a lot of effort

If there was a bot that kept up with my work and just summarised all the progress since my reviews ... that would really be super useful and I’d likely do more reviews

👤 axaxs
Finding something to join meetings in my place, and record anything I was needed for, if anything.
👤 markus_zhang
I'd like to build a robot to check if a colleague is sitting at his desk or not.
👤 pitcher
Repeated tasks, low structure but high effort:

- Finding files that are relevant to my work

- Meetings / stand ups

- Creating status reports and communicating progress with work

I often find that tasks I do repeatedly is often not automatable due to high contextual information that is required to do so

👤 sellingwebsite
you will find numerous examples of what can be automated on this thread https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ebp6ak/there_is_...