What is the best thing that you've automated?

My blog. Used to have to do a lot of customization, such as image resizing, custom formatting every time I wanted to post something.

Now I have a custom plug-in that I wrote for obsidian that lets me click a button which exports the markdown note, optimally resizes all of the related videos and images, sends them to a static side generator, seamlessly uploads to GitHub and runs a GH action that publishes it to my VPS.

Downside is that I don't have as much of an excuse for being lazy when it comes to authoring new content.

A script to download tar.gz log files and export to specific folder based on date and environment. With this tool I could save at least 100 hours.

People still trying to download by hand and exporting and checking one by one. For me only four question to answer. Which project? Which year and month? Which day(not necessary) and which environment.

I love to build products, but with each product comes great responsibility. To market the product and dominate SEO, I used to build blogs for products. And every time I did that it took a lot of time to setup a blog, I tried lot of ways, coding a new app, deploying to vercel/aws/firebase, setting up domain etc.

So, I automated the process of blog creation for my various projects and built https://shedtheshade.com on a custom VPS using Ghost Platform as base image with enough storage and processing and used Cloudflare to automate SSL and provide CDN.

Now, I am glad that whenever I start new project I can simply start theming and create posts and publish them without coding for it, deploying it, or waiting for migration of my domain's DNS to Cloudflare(takes around 2 hrs. only).

Edit: Formatting

Our shared Netflix account, lol. A while back they made it so that the account owner has to update your household whenever you tried to access it from a different IP range. It was really annoying (which was the point, so people would buy individual subs instead).

So we just set up a simple forwarder so everyone gets a copy of the update email and can self-service the update. A lot quicker than bugging the account owner.

Next step when I have time is to just make a puppeteer script to click that damned button automatically.

I don't really watch Netflix enough to justify my own sub, so it's that or nothing I guess.

A script to connect to my phone's hotspot, and then mount it via sshfs. Need to turn on hotspot and start the DropBear ssh server on the phone first.

A script to copy new photos from the phone to the laptop, and then resize them all and copy those into a 'small' subdirectory.

A script to unmount and disconnect.

Those three scripts invoked in sequence in one command line.

Invoke that line from history with ESC-K.