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I automate extensively, but I don't use many modern/specialised tools just for automation. I tend to rely on general purpose scripting tools, templates, and pro

I automate extensively, but I don't use many modern/specialised tools just for automation. I tend to rely on general purpose scripting tools, templates, and programming with relevant APIs instead. For example, I write many simple programs, often just shell scripts, and I have a go-to set of popular libraries and system tools for most integration purposes. I use many types of triggers to start those activities, including scheduled jobs, hooks from local programs like Git, webhooks from online services, and various other things. I also customise software UIs extensively. My text editor, graphics and other creative programs, browsers, and other software that I use regularly are all full of macros, templates, presets and the like, and often have reconfigured keyboard shortcuts, menus/toolbars, or event triggers set up to access them quickly or perform tasks automatically at appropriate times. As for why I don’t use a lot of the modern, dedicated automation tools, it’s not that I have anything in particular against them, but after building software for the first few decades, I find it is almost always faster and more reliable for me personally to do things the “old-fashioned” way. These modern, pretty tools are all communicating with the services they automate using APIs behind the scenes anyway, and accessing those is usually straightforward from just about any decent shell or programming language if you need to.

mk4p 9y ago
> These modern, pretty tools are all communicating with the services they automate using APIs behind the scenes anyway, and accessing those is usually straightforward from just about any decent shell or programming language if you need to. Could you give some examples?
- Chris_Newton 9y ago
  Could you give some examples? Sure. In fact, Zapier have a good example right on their home page, showing a connection between someone submitting a form to Wufoo and adding their email address to a MailChimp mailing list. For automation purposes, Wufoo can trigger a webhook when a form is submitted and MailChimp have a REST API that can be used to manage mailing lists. So, if I wanted to automate that sort of task, I’d probably just set up an endpoint on a server to receive those webhooks and then write a few lines of Python to extract the required form fields and send them off to MailChimp, instead of introducing the additional dependency and potentially cost of an intermediary service like Zapier.
  - laittg 9y ago
    I used Zapier in about 2 months and had the same conclusion. It is still easier and to write a few lines of code (Node.js in my case) to expose a REST API, extract some fields and make a POST request to another service with an authorization header. The benefits of using Zapier as an intermediary service makes no sense for me.
jepras 9y ago
For someone new to programming and very frustrated when apps dont have the desired shortcuts, can you explain or point me to an article that says how to create these myself? Thanks!

mk4p 9y ago

> These modern, pretty tools are all communicating with the services they automate using APIs behind the scenes anyway, and accessing those is usually straightforward from just about any decent shell or programming language if you need to. Could you give some examples?

Chris_Newton 9y ago
Could you give some examples? Sure. In fact, Zapier have a good example right on their home page, showing a connection between someone submitting a form to Wufoo and adding their email address to a MailChimp mailing list. For automation purposes, Wufoo can trigger a webhook when a form is submitted and MailChimp have a REST API that can be used to manage mailing lists. So, if I wanted to automate that sort of task, I’d probably just set up an endpoint on a server to receive those webhooks and then write a few lines of Python to extract the required form fields and send them off to MailChimp, instead of introducing the additional dependency and potentially cost of an intermediary service like Zapier.
- laittg 9y ago
  I used Zapier in about 2 months and had the same conclusion. It is still easier and to write a few lines of code (Node.js in my case) to expose a REST API, extract some fields and make a POST request to another service with an authorization header. The benefits of using Zapier as an intermediary service makes no sense for me.

jepras 9y ago

For someone new to programming and very frustrated when apps dont have the desired shortcuts, can you explain or point me to an article that says how to create these myself? Thanks!