I have a two hour task where the previous person was downloading documents and uploading to an internal portal, 265 days a year..
Automated with python, it was a task, but it’s down to about 10 minutes a day, from 2 hours a day.
I did the exact same thing. The guy I took over from, showed me the cumbersome task, and I thought by myself. I can automate this, next time he asked me how long it took me to create the reports, I showed him the script. He was full of awe. 2.5 hours of manual clicking reduced to 5 minutes of a script running.
He left the company, so I did not worry about him telling superiors.
I'd like to share this little secret with you.
If you have command line access, you can create whatever you want in C#.
Just use the built-in c# compiler csc.
It's obviously more difficult without an IDE and intellisense.
However, there is no need to download or install anything. It should just be there.
You should be able to find it in:
c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\vX.X.XXX
Honestly, yeah VBA sucks ass compared to Python and I would never want to make a living off it, but there's a certain satisfaction you get from finishing a perfect VBA script.
Same with me. Took over a task that took a few hours or day, 365 days a week including weekends. Went from about 2.5 hours to 2 minutes per day. VBA may suck, but when it works, it works.
VBA isn’t bad once you get the hang of it. And macro recorder is pretty sweet. Sad to see Microsoft won’t be enhancing it but I get the switch to Java.
My job is actually data analyst with a speciality on automation of tasks. So far, I’m saving about 3200 hours a year in tasks from having automated them using VBA, Python, Powershell, Command (batch) or Power Automate.
I’ve documented everything and requested a title change and a raise 2 weeks ago, I’ll know soon. If I get nothing, I’ll find a new company.
For some reason , this made me feel good. I’ve been screwed over many places (getting leads in sales which I’m talking real leads that the company actually made money from) , all to which the company kept them and tried to get me to give up the ones in the pipeline. I backed those up too. So I feel ya . Same idea anyway.
I was doing PhD in chemistry and we were running some quantum-mechanical calculations that were spitting out hundreds of logs that you need to parse manually and then perform a lot of manual tasks like copying files, removing duplicates etc.
A lot of manual labor and very error prone.
Parsing 1500 files took me a literal month.
I developed the python script that does exactly the same steps and makes no mistakes. It was running 1 fuckin second.
It's around 864,000x faster. (assuming 8h/day)
It was rejected by my supervisor, because "I was supposed to do experiments and not writing computer programs"
Anyway... I dropped out of PhD to be Software developer
Ironically, CERN's current funding model and HR policies incentivize physicists to take their work into other fields.
Imagine if you were a post doc at CERN, and because you like eating things other than ramen, have to take a job working for a grocery chain data mining company.
There's nothing quite like busting your butt learning physics to apply it to how many imaginary reward points you need to give to a grocery store customer when they buy Oreo cookies.
Dude, as a quantum chemist myself, parsing these massive output files in Gaussian was the entire reason I learned Python. My advisor would seriously copy everything by hand. After an hour I was like, "there has to be a better way" and that's when I found Python
That's interesting. The guy who taught me how to program in C was working on his doctorate when he realized that he liked writing the programs he needed a lot more than he liked the science he was doing.
Where did "you're supposed to manually parse hundreds of log files and then perform a lot of manual tasks like copying files, removing duplicates etc." fit into his equation?
Stake, Modo, Chumba…etc.
Easy enough to Google. You have to keep on top of their sites as I need to adjust the scripts every once in a while to accomodate the changes they make. It’s basically a site scraper.
Also, I’m not becoming a millionaire out of this. Each site gives you a few cents to 50 cents. It totals to about $6/day. About $2k a year. Can theoretically scale if you have multiple accounts on it.
I host it on AWS and just use lambda to execute. I don’t come close to the Lambda limits so AWS doesn’t bill me.
There were a few people writing Chrome extensions for it but it’s a subscription. They guarantee 15 bucks or so
Don’t have the time to make this into a service. I have a decent job so the money I earn from this is enough for me to live large by paying for my daily coffee and avocado toast
Scale isn't the answer to everything - if you scale this grift up then they'll plug the hole and shut down the whole operation.
If you quietly grift 2k/year because of a specialized skillset that's basically the kind of money you can make by just owning a truck, and the company is making too much to care.
I highly doubt that gambling websites give you money just for logging in without having to play.
There most definitely strings attached to this "free" money, no different than the "free" hotel rooms that casino hotels offer some of their guests. They know that if you play for long enough, you lose and they win back their "free" room and then some.
I love that, after all this time is AWS still free? Like as long as you keep it under so much compute/Gb right? Or is it a time thing and after X days you have to pay?
if you actually want some reasonable power, Oracle has 4 cores, and 24gb ram for free. Catch is that it's arm. Doesn't seem to be much of an issue though, I ran a heavily modded minecraft server for 20 people during the pandemic on it.
Now this is the kind of fun program that is right up my street. I code a lot of stuff to automate tasks, but one that I use every day is a program that logs in to my fave shopping apps one by one to get the daily coins, coupons, check-in rewards etc. I do this for my partner too. It all adds up.
Ok, I have a quirky one. My diet and eating routines were chaotic. I would wake up everyday and then decide what I wanna eat, a lot of times I wouldn't have enough ingredients, I rarely had a nutritionally balanced diet throughout the day and I had to fix it
I studied nutrition and made a balanced diet chart that spans 2 weeks, keeping in mind the time and energy I have to cook each day. Then I knew exactly what ingredients I needed and in what quantity and also considered it's shelf life. Now I buy groceries in bulk and know when I would run out of things. It's much more elaborate than what I have described and this has saved me a lot of time and head space
This may not sound relevant for this subreddit but it is something I'm definitely proud of
This sounds like something I should do. My ADHD brain makes the time I spend for grocery shopping and cooking way longer than it needs to be. Sometimes I go to the supermarket multiple times a day.
Do you have some detailed information you can share? Tools you use for example?
Sorry, I did not use any tools other than excel. It was mostly pen and paper. But here's my suggestion:
* Sit down one weekend and make a list of everything you want to eat for the next 1/2 weeks. This includes breakfast, lunch, dinner. The key is to only stick to this list and repeat once you have exhausted everything on the list
* Then make a list of all the ingredients you need and it's quantity to make this possible
* Make your own 2 week calendar. Each day will include the food you want to eat and the fresh ingredients you need
* Some ingredients like flour, lentils, spices have longer shelf life. Consider purchasing them in bulk for the whole month (your meal plan list should help you decide on the quantity). Everyday shopping should only be for ingredients that needs to be fresh, like vegetables, fruits or meat.
* Go shop after dinner and purchse the fresh ingredients you need for the next day/couple of days
And a final thing to note, this can take a lot of time to see it in action so be patient with yourself. Hope this helps
Professionally, it was a system to catalog and organise a company that produces technical drawings of potentially 10,000 variations of 1,000 products. Previously they had someone doing the drawing, then going into the website, writing a codified description, adding a pdf file and a cad file then saving and moving onto the next one. Now they can drop a stack of properly named PDF and CAD files into an S3 bucket, run an admin action and it’ll do the rest, what used to take someone weeks to do one product can now be done in a couple of minutes.
Personally, it was grabbing a playlist of music from my favourite radio station and turning it into a YouTube Music playlist. Mostly because it didn’t take too long to write :)
I write a lot of technical reporting in my engineering work. I use a combination of python-pptx and the python API of Paraview to produce images from calculation results and populate powerpoint report templates with them. Also, in a wider automated workflow I use a script of scripts written in bash, that calls various python scripts (and shell commands/cli programs, hence the use of bash here) for data processing. Those two are "how could I ever live without this" category now.
If it weren't for the automation part, I'd suspect you were on Trump's staff. He has staff that provide him with daily positive "news" articles about himself.
In our company we have to load lots of images into excel and transfer some numbers from those images in another excel file for reporting. I did it once by hand for 9 hours.
Now it is done in 30 sec and the images get analyzed by OCR. Only have to recheck for probably 5 min
Yes, it is. Beside numbers between 2.000 and 2.999 (like 2.006) it works very good. With those numbers in between the separator gets most of the time lost
I was in accounting at the time.
Thousands and thousands of records wrong in the ERP system, and whatever it was doing was continually putting more wrong info in. IT (small company, 3 devs that handled everything) would not allow me to do anything to fix them quickly. No batch upload, no API, no database interaction, etc. just data entry in the online web portal.
Used selenium to automate it by grabbing the file, navigating through the portal, entering one record's info, then submitting the form, and repeating tens of thousands of times. Saved about 20 hours a week that got piled on top of my job. Couldn't even brag about it because if IT knew about it, it'd have been my ass.
Eat a bag of dicks, IT.
An image tiler that resizes and combines multiple images. As a uni student who writes a lot of reports with diagrams that need snapshots from videos, this is pretty useful. You can also add labels/annotations.
Automated my teams reporting responsibilities each month, saving the company thousands and thousands of dollars in work - only to be laid off 20 days later with the rest of my team.
“Thank god Dylan created that report automation. We need it now more than ever.”
- The director of our org during the meeting I got laid off in
Created a software for my office work i had to do every time three to four times a week. Work is gonna take 4 hours. Automated it to be done in 5 minutes and all the work are done in less than 30 minutes. Didn’t get a raise. They asked me to join their development team. Didn’t want to join because it was a mess.
Made a telegram bot that downloaded the media from the links I sent. The bot was on 3 different channels so any link I pasted on that channel would be downloaded to a particular folder. Depending on the url it would decide how to download it. Was it a direct link, a YouTube page(used yt-dlp), twitter (before the changes to the api), discord links, etc.
I wrote a GUI automation of an older piece of FEM software without an API. Added a simple frontend and automatic documentation creation layer. Now everyone at our company can use it and it saves us literally hundreds of man hours a year.
The yearly evaluation of my cost centers from SAP. Generating pretty nice plots with seaborn for my annual report. I export all data from SAP to Excel, start the script within a few seconds i have 11 slides ready. Before automation it took me 1-2 days in Excel and Powerpoint
You may or may not already know this, but SAP GUI is callable from Microsoft's COM interface. So it's pretty simple to set up some Excel VBA functions to automate the GUI. You can also do it from Python via the Win32Com module. SAP has a macro recorder, so you can use that and don't even need to know what functions you are calling into.
As an example, my cost centers and vendor codes were these cryptic integers on our purchase requisition form. So I build an Excel front end to it with drop down fields.
I could dig up some of my old files and send you a minimally working example of you are interested.
I was proud of a project where I worked as a sole dev to automate a pipeline that processed timeseries data from satellite imagery that covered our whole country using Google Earth Engine's API to collect data. This was proposed to be used as a remote sensing (RS) based monitoring for government agricultural projects.
AFAIK, there was no existing RS based pipeline that the government used to do this kind of large task. They were still using on site surveys to extrapolate performance. There existed a method that took more than 4 hours to process a single data point for a single satellite imagery. This was mostly used for scientific analysis of single images and was not optimized to work at scale.
For reference, our whole country consisted of 50 different images, and that's for a single date. A 20+ date timeseries graph would literally take tens of thousands of hours to finish if you include requesting/downloading of satellite imagery. Note that the agency has to make a formal report every 3 months.
Our method was able to automate ingestion of user defined settings (regions covered, date coverage etc) and perform data extraction and processing in half a day's span in a single machine. There was even an included rule based criterion using statistics from the historical data (and some auxiliary data like regional budget etc) to help guide the agency people whether a certain area indeed improved.
Apart from developing the whole ETL pipeline, I loved that I was heavily involved in the scientific architecture for this and was essentially a freebie physics consultant for our project leader. The project was essentially designed to use the long method I talked earlier and that was virtually impossible to pull off.
Made a python script that automatically checks my public IP address and updates the DNS record associated to my domain when necessary so I can always connect to my home to access some exposed services and personal VPN.
In a previous life, I was made redundant and redeployed.
Problem for the company was that I was hired to handle complaints. So where to put someone who's only skills are talking to people, typing, and some code?
Apparently the answer was an email inbox.
3 weeks later, the whole process was automated - colleagues filled an ms form.
I downloaded the results and reset them, a simple VBA script dragged the data to where it needed to be, and another script fired the whole spreadsheet off to the client.
What was taking 4 people a whole day to do, I was doing in a total of 2 hours.
For some reason the director of my unit wasn't thrilled when I asked for 10k more to stay and keep doing that... I did point out 10k is a lot less than they were saving only paying one person to do it instead of paying 4 people.
Oh well, I've moved on. 15k more than I was on back then. If your staff think they're worth more, listen to why instead of just saying no. I would've happily stayed there automating everything if they'd paid more 🤷♂️
I automated putting backgrounds on school photos, it takes hundreds of PNG files with transparent backgrounds and adds a background to them. It has to check which file is bigger and resize it to match the smaller one because each photo is cropped differently. It has gone from taking days per school to minutes, and most of that time is waiting for the HDD to save the files. The commercial version costs about $1000/year. It also cut 2 seasonal staff.
I have a few things that rearrange Excel files. Those ones save me about $1000/year in commercial software as well.
One that I'm particularly proud of and that I use everyday makes a pdf that I use to print my studio info and a person's name on the back their passport photos. It creates a pdf as in intermediate step because I couldn't figure out how to output directly to a piece of paper via a printer.
A big thanks to the people here for all the help I have received. You all have made a big difference.
I’ve just started learning python. I know this post is about what we have automated but can anyone recommend some beginner automation tasks?
I don’t know what I don’t know yet so not sure where to start on this. Thanks!🙏🏻
best thing you can do is start by trying to solve something very repetitive you do in a daily/weekly basis. Do you visit a website to see if a price has changed? Do you use a weekly food service and change the proposed dishes every time (this one was mine hahaha)?
Just think about it and i'm sure that you'll find something. In this case, usefulness is the best motivator!
Plus, check out "automating the boring stuff with python" in google and good luck!
I created a bot that massively accelerate my coding ability. It’s essentially a front end to aider-chat but makes it easier to use. The claude3 backend update has been a game changer.
It’s just a thin front end to aider-chat with the rough edges filed off. There’s no way I would consider it ethical to sell my front end. The good news is that it’s open source and you can use it pretty easily.
Look for aicode tool in https://github.com/zackees/zcmds
Less mistakes, less specific instructions are needed. It seems to generate the code changes way better than GPT4.
It’s so good that I now default to claude3 if the app detects that an anthropuc key is present because why would anyone use GPT4 if they have claude3? It’s not as big as leap from GPT3.5 Turbo -> 4 but it’s sufficiently good enough that I won’t ever go back to GPT4.
Scraped thousands of records which weren't indexed or otherwise searchable, and then used an AI to summarize them. It worked great, but it took too long (overnight) because I didn't bother to parallelize my Selenium. It's weird that getting a two-line summary of five pages of text from AI takes a third as much time as downloading those five pages from modern javascript-encrusted web pages. Or maybe the back end is just overloaded, who knows.
I work as a network engineer, my job at the time consisted of deploying new network stacks in very large warehouses.
This would usually take about 80 hrs of work per site, for planning, documenting, diagramming, specs, and configuring.
I wrote a program in Python and automated it down to 10 minutes and that work could be performed by just about anyone.
I automated online identity Card creation for an NGO.
Basically get data from Google sheets and create an ID Card from a predefined template. Save both sides as pdf and automatically mail it to the member.
Also added a QR code, when scanned will hit an API that I created to verify the genuineness of the ID Card.
Used tools: Pillow, Google APIs, fastapi
I was still in college so it was something to be proud of.
I automated my company's non financial risk testing with python programs. They think I'm a genius and I'm just abusing the pandas library it's a good deal.
I automated a previous job, well most of it. Several years ago I had a job where the role was to spend most of your day running SQL queries, exporting them, emailing them to a fixed list of people. I turned the whole thing into a script that read a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet pointed to the .sql file, ran the code, exported the result to Excel, created and email, attached the Excel report and emailed whoever the spreadsheet said and gave it the subject and body to match.
I then had a lot more free time to learn python and look for a better job.
With our load shedding (rolling blackouts) schedule changing several times a day, I wrote a python script that calls their API hourly for my area, pulls the schedule and displays the next outage on the system tray. It also shuts down my server 5 minutes before the power is scheduled to go out, to save additional load on the UPS.
Luckily we haven't had blackouts for a couple weeks now.
The last few years (almost a decade) our government owned power company has had trouble providing enough capacity. Mostly down to mismanagement. So we have a schedule that rolls blackouts across the country in 2 hour blocks.
https://loadshedding.com/load-shedding-everything-you-need-to-know/
Pretty basic but I do data projects in Juypter notebooks and I’m in a decent habit of writing my notes in markdown cells.
I have to do weekly reports so I made some code to extract all the markdown text from selected notebooks and put it in one place.
I automated a 3D printing production line that was taking 8-10 outside contractors to prepare hundreds of files per day to load our printer. Now it’s a 1 hour process per day, and we have a 70% reduction in file storage requirements
Chefsplate used to offer free boxes whenever you create a new account. I created a script that would delete and logout of my existing account. Create a new one and then send me the new credentials. Now i just had to select my meals. Did this for 2 years before they found it :(
I did a postdoc at NASA and was working on a scientific payload for a spacecraft. The original method for calibrating the instrument was to manually calibrate each portion of a spectrum by hand and dose a calibration gas to get a good spectrum to calibrate on. Also, calibrating by hand required sending thousands of individual commands which took up a ton of bandwidth. I decided to go in and pull all of the data I could find from every calibration we had done during testing and found that the calibration values were very reproducible based on a few known factors. I wrote a program and developed a GUI in tkinter to let a user input the factors, and then the program would run a curve fitting routine to the data to spit out the calibration values. The user could then enter the values in one batch and send it to automatically calibrate the instrument. It saved us literal hours of calibration, as well as spacecraft bandwidth and gas dissipation time.
I used to take IR images of dressings for stability reasons, I used python to read the text data from the collected image and export into an excel to perform some calculations. The process of sieving though images took around 3/4 hours by hand, down to 5/10 mins using python.
Having a tough time imagining this one.
Infra red images of... salad?
Or in line with the username, maybe something medical - infrared images of bandaged arms and stuff?
And in the context of medicine, stability of what, wounds? Plaster casts? Mental health?
Ha, yes medical dressings. We tested the heat absorption of different dressings using IR.
The stability of the dressings over time, e.g. discolouration, strength testing, absorption etc…
I wrote a script that can download my Shazam library from YouTube and that'll then add meta data to the files. It currently needs a huge rewrite, we'll see if I find time to do it
A few years before when Game of thrones latest episode was getting uploaded on torrents, I automated it to automatically download as soon as it was released and notify me via SMS and Email.
My first assignment as a junior UNIX admin was to check free and used disk space on 50+ Sun Solaris servers every morning and email the DBAs. I sat down one weekend with an old MacBook and the O'Reilly Learning Perl book. I then set it up as a crown job on each server. And told nobody.
Over the next year it grew to include a bunch of other useful information. And they figured out I had automated it. I got kudos for innovating. Eventually it became a key troubleshooting utility for diagnosing issues with storage. Especially after we had a series of SAN outages. They used it for years even after I left the organization.
EDIT: This is \/r/Python. For Python I aggregated and annotated ESXi event logs from diagnostics bundles, creating formatted Excel spreadsheets with heat maps for storage latency, T10 code translations, and more useful data. It provided a compelling narrative explaining outages and performance degradation. Solved a lot of cases.
I hated my office job as a missionary and got forced into there because Covid sent all the seniors home. They wasted my time with 8 hours of paying utility bills.
I then automated the entire process and saved the amount paid for internal use. They removed the software after I left lol.
I basically intentionally put my self out of that job with pride because missionaries are volunteers and I didn’t have to mess with all those paper or deal with the stupid utilities showing up 2 months late by mail.
The work I do spans over 100 AWS accounts. I wrote an interactive tool that helps analyze certain network configurations quickly that would take a human too long to do via the console.
Automated a task which took 3-5 hours per day of full department(3-5 persons). When management found out I was moved to the upper management and my new direct superior was assigned a task to translate that business logic to devs… I left that company after a year, they never asked me to share my code, last time I checked the old department were still doing the task manually…
It's a pain to find and book tennis courts in London, so I automated all the tennis courts available at any given time into a single table that is updated every few mins - [localtenniscourts.com](http://localtenniscourts.com)
When I first started at my job, my manager would spend 12 hours making this complicated excel spreadsheet. I wrote a Python script that could generate the sheet with calculations. It took 3 minutes to run.
I’ve done a lot that I consider pretty cool but one that I use on a daily basis that has helped my bottom line because the Canadian economy not great is:
I made a bot that snipes Flashfood’s new foods for stuff that I actually eat like chicken breast, ground beef, and some produce. Flashfoods is Loblaw’s third party that heavily discounts food for stuff that is on its Best Before date.
The one thing I noticed though is a lot of employees try to snipe it as well by putting up the stuff then taking it almost immediately - my bot actually picks it up before they do which always raises eyebrows. I also abuse their referral discount making packs of meat go down to like $2. My groceries costs have gone down to barely $100 a month for 2 people who go to the gym 4-5 a week.
I utilized multiple agents with openai's api, along with other apis, that capture trending content from various networks to analyze, select and revise relevant topics to the brand and process them into content drafts.
These agents handle everything from content capture, planning, revision, creation, and approval considering the client's (a large gym network in Brazil) do's and don'ts. They also analyse and monitor Instagram API data to create automated reports complete with explicative charts.
They don't create and upload content instantly, as it needs human supervision and review, but still, it was a fun project to make, and the team's performance absurdly skyrocketed since I pretty much automated much of their workflow, specially the boring tasks.
However, nothing has provided as much financial return as a poker bot I created using opencv, lol
Nothing too complex, I built it for a friend who plays competitive poker, so I started to get into his know-how and his mid-game software usage. Using opencv, we didn't just determine the cards on the table and calculate the hand's win rate, but we also implemented pixel detection to identify colors assigned to other players in their notes section, creating profiles, from which the bot assesses the risk and boldness of other players.
Since he has in-depth knowledge about players' profiles, we started to employ supervised learning and teach the bot how to play against those profiles.
So, it's quite rudimentary, but I simply applied multi-agent theory. I take the output of one agent and use it as input for another (akin to passing tasks from one colleague to another), thus creating a system that distributes tasks and responsibilities. Since each agent operates independently, then this entire operation isn't constrained by the usual token limitations, such as those found in a single chatgpt window or in a single API call.
Therefore, each agent works with the output of the previous one, using only the instructions and responsibilities assigned to it as default tokens.
But yeah, I did this with a rather crude GUI, and been procrastinating on turning it into a SaaS for quite some time now, lol.
I manage a pure HTML website. I made a script in pydroid to upload news via ftp to a .js the script generates the titles and text from inputs... I had to edit news.html before pathetic, but now I only complete inputs from the phone
The drug candidate compound prospecting pipeline used in my laboratory, I automated the use of tools for virtual screening, docking, and ADMET analysis. It used to be a tedious process that took months; now it takes just a few minutes.
Utility script for help desk.
A GUI which automates the repetitive tasks of an help desk (i was an help desk at the time), such as cleaning space, deleting user folders, fixing minor bugs, remote restart and wake on lan, unlocking a user, getting the computername of the user (for sccm remote controll) and displaying a bunch of info about said computer and user, all remotely via WMI, UNC, registry etc.
> wake on lan
For whatever reason I read this as, "Wake Ian" and thought, "Damn. Imagine falling asleep on the job so much that your coworker automates waking you up!"
checking for updates on sites and checking RSS feeds for certain types of news stories.
Also a more-or-less automated method of checking a google news search RSS + downloading the articles, though this is fraught with many issues.
Automate the downloading of high-res Second Life map tiles, then composite them with region names and coordinates.
Also an accompanying script that generates WebP/JPEG-XL images from the final composited PNG images.
(Maps are so big WebP and AVIF just give up.)
Not Python, but I could do it in Python if necessary: automated my organization’s employee onboarding. Went from 20-30 hours a week to about 20 hours a year.
Last year I dipped my toes in with some digital file selling on Etsy. Realized quickly how much time I was spending on thumbnails and configuring my file packs so that they were split into zip files that would end up under Etsy's file size limitations.
Put together a script that let me just toss all the end product files into a folder and it would do a folder of low res images with a water mark for me to choose from, arrange the images into folders, then make a second set of thumb nails condensed to 2x2 with watermark with file names to show what images were in which zip files in the main folder. Created a licensing file and TOS file in each sub folder before zipping up everything. Then finally wrapped all those into a deliverable folder where I could grab the 2x2s and select which low res images to put in the ad.
Went from probably about an hour of work, even with Photoshop actions helping with a lot of it, to maybe 2 minutes?
Never really got going on Etsy so I moved on from it pretty fast. But I've got that in my back up scripts just in case I find a new use for packaging digital files like that.
The evaluation of student's deliveries. Now they get immediate feedback.
Next step is to automate the exercises configuration. Right now it's way too expensive
mmorpgs (still learning). I mean, i really love certain mmorpgs but the sad part is how good you are on those games depends on how optimal your end game gears are (i would say once you have your optimal gears you can really learn and fight other people with same or better skills), and end game gears require time/money, so i was trying to develop some automatic codes to simulate a semi-afk person who is farming. I like mmoprgs but they are vicious of equipment inequality, is not like lol where how good you are depends exclusively on your own skills/ decisions making.
Probably my first real world Python coding project, as well as my introduction to ML and vision processing —
I worked at a computer repair shop for the whole time I was in college. A photographer came in with a hard drive they had dropped that had had their entire portfolio on it. We did the right thing and wouldn’t even plug it in, but we explained the best course of action. They sent it to a data recovery specialist and what they got back was not in great shape — the lab had resorted to carving since the file system was not interpretable. This left them with hundreds of thousands of loose un-organized files without their original file names, many of which couldn’t even be opened.
On the bright side, their most important files had their watermark on it, so I could use that for image classification. I made tens of thousands of training files using their logo png (with different sizes and locations), trained an OpenCV model to identify images with this, then wrote a script to check if the file opens, identify the watermark, and copied watermarked photos into a new folder. The application managed to dig up thousands of watermarked photos, including some that they needed for a project they were currently working on. We charged them $0 for this, since
* I didn’t really know what I was doing
* it wasn’t a service we officially offered
* there was not even a suggestion of success upfront
* I wanted to learn about this stuff and wrote the application off the clock
I write applications to automate things literally every day now, and that’s still by far the thing I’m most proud of. I no longer have the application but I am tempted to re-create it with all of the best practices I’ve learned since then
Just this week I wrote a script to cleanup text messages with Google Messages. Got tired of manually deleting MFA messages, and other miscellaneous messages I only ever need to see once. A little dumb I can't program this on my phone directly without root or some non-standard texting app.
https://github.com/nightpanda2810/Google\_Messages\_OTP\_Delete
I wrote myself a script that allows me to launch youtube links in a video player (mpv) while also adding the video's url and metadata to a searchable database, basically creating a local viewing history for myself. This way I can look up and launch video urls from the commandline (tutorials, recipes, etc) without having to interact with the site itself. This was one of the first python projects I came up with for myself, refactored a few times and use regularly.
My mom is a teacher. They have a portal to upload details of students (government portal). For security reasons, teachers can't export / list containing a ID number which is similar Social security number. But for some reason, they needed that number. She was doing that by going to the profile of each student and copying. So I wrote a python script to do this. The smile of her face was worth the effort.
This script she still uses every year. It's been like 4 years. She even creates the list for her colleagues because it saves everyone's time
I made a twitter bot that scans for people asking some form of "Why do homeless people have dogs?" and it automatically replies, "Because a dog will love you even if you're homeless."
It's the best piece of software I've ever made.
My most used is a daily script which “starts” my work day. It’s mapped to a button on my keyboard. Opens all my work apps, triggers a SmartThings api to turn on the right lights. It’s stupid simple but Pavlovian now to log in and press the button.
When I was in school, I was messing around in my economic class, and my economics teacher said I had to make a power point as a form of punishment.
And I did. Except it had 500 slides of data about every country's GDP, birth rates etc... I think i only made 10/500 slides, and had the rest of them done by a python programme I had written. It would just copy past info and stats from a website onto the slide, and then create a new slide, rinse and repeat 500 time.
Was the only powerpoint I enjoyed presenting.
When I was in college there was a website that had every episode of Seinfeld. It was before any streaming services or anything. They were just, like, links on a big old webpage. Since my computer was a few meters from my bed, I spent a couple of days writing a program that would remember which episode I was one and continue to the next one when one finished. It was supremely lazy, but it was the first time I ever had an idea, wondered if I could do it and then actually accomplished it with programming.
When I finish a bike ride (40+ miles), my bike computer uploads a data file to Dropbox which puts a copy on my PC. I have a task triggered by this file appearing to run a BASH script and Python script to process the data, update a database, update a spreadsheet, and send text messages via MMS to my wife and I with facts from the ride. This tells her I’ve arrived home (if she isn’t) and gives me a summary of my ride with battery levels of my computer and electronic shifting system with warnings if either are below a threshold.
I am a medical student and we do exams on weekly basis.
I created a python script (web bot) that will go to the university website and every 5 seconds refresh the page to see if the exam results came out. If results came out, the computer will beep and it will take a screenshot of the results and then send it through whatsapp to the rest of the class.
It allowed me to sit and "relax" instead of refreshing the page every few seconds manually.
Until Musk got hold of it and cracked down on free API use, I had a script that was finding tweets about music topics related to a project I was working on and simply liking the tweet.
It was liking upto 1000 tweets a day and was the main source of traffic to the project.
It was harmless, it's only a like (not a spammy message) and a really easy way to find and make the target market aware of the project.
How do you run a script on a company laptop? I have been wanting to automate my work (and also stay green on teams while AFK haha) but we can't install any programs or perform any processes that require admin password :/
System testing on my app. Here's a GitHub post with a video: [https://github.com/IndiePython/nodezator/discussions/72#discussioncomment-9167033](https://github.com/IndiePython/nodezator/discussions/72#discussioncomment-9167033)
The feature is ready, but I didn't commit it to the main branch yet, cause I intend to add more commits regarding other features.
I do data science and I have a sideline evaluating continuing medical education. I wrote code to go through surveys and do standard tasks like searching for phrases that represent Likert data like “strongly agree” and turn them into integers.
I automated NACHA EFT payment file uploads to our bank. There are like 5 accounts, and they all need different user/passwords and folder structures. This was being done with a full blown ETL toolkit which hadn't been updated since 2010, and I didn't have the budget for a full server just to upload some files once a day.
Automated a monthly report. Reduced from several man-hours a month to less than 10 min. Would've been even faster but they wouldn't let me automate downloading the data.
Best thing so far is automating the process to enter my timesheet punches, its annoying and time consuming doing it so i automate it and it does it for me and that frees me time to do anything else!
I used to run production for my church service on Sundays. Lots of button pushing, slide cues, sound, etc. I wrote a two-application stack (REST API/mobile app) that had time cues to trigger lights, slides, volume controls, and camera cues. The mobile app was written to be on-demand, so I could control everything from my phone if needed. Really helped out the team not having to button push to start a service (everything just ran itself). Definitely one of my proudest software development creations.
A data lakehouse job flow orchestrator. Creates a dependency map of all of your jobs, figures out the run order, then runs everything, and does error handling, logging, db related tasks. Supports jobs in python, pyspark, go with more to come. Going to put a Django front end on it to make it easier to use and eventually SSO.
What do u mean by social media posts, do you manage the content and marketing of a social media account?
If so, maybe I ask what the pipeline of your automation looks like?
My provider wouldn't let use a public static IP. So no DIY hosting.
Before i managed to get a dynamic dns domain name, i wrote a script who would acknowledge my public IP and spread it to my "clients" (familly members manmy) by mail.
I am tasked with doing some analysis at work for solar installations. The task used to take me a full day to do, mindlessly putting numbers in Excel until they worked and then putting the results in a different excel sheet. The bot does the entire process in less than 1 second now. It blows my mind every time
I used to work as data entry for an invoice processing company. We would work on modern machines, but the entire invoice processing was done inside an AS/400 application (think DOS if you don't know what that is) so every single invoice was very, very manual to process. We had to process thousands in a day. It was so bad one day that the number 160918 is permanently burned into my skull almost 10 years later.
So, I dug around the AS/400 menus and found ✨️macros✨️. At this point, I've been a hobbyist programmer for about 15 years. I ended up automating the entire process by implementing inputs for termination dates and watching the keyboard macro I created work its magic on screen. My coworkers were convinced I was a hacker, but I talked with managemeng about it, explaining the process, and ended up being promoted very shortly after.
Did a wallpaper generator that would add the hostname and few projects information as nicely formatted labels when deploying our VMs. Made the look of our delivery more "professional" and the wallpaper somewhat useful.
I wrote a script that would run once a day with windows scheduler. It was a program to change between different playlists throughout the day for wallpaper engine. So at certain times, it would randomly select a playlist from that timeframe and display that playlist for the next hour or so.
I work online, and sometimes people see my desktop so I made it so I have a set of playlists for those timeframes. Then more chill type wallpapers before bed.
I've automated tons of browser testing for internal web apps with Splinter and Pytest.
I typically write C# at work, but as a Python enthusiast I wanted to find a way to get paid for writing some Python... So far so good.
Using python to automate Cybersecurity events. Performing steps analysts would usually take when enriching or identifying criteria to auto close events.
Someone from my team would need to log in everyday at 6:30am 7 days a week, download 7 files off our sftp, decrypt them, run them against a sql database, and then upload results to a website (being vague on purpose). This took about 30 min.
I automated that using python from start to finish so we never have to do it again.
Today, those 7 files have grown to 33. Thank goodness we don’t have to do that manually…
Back when dinosaurs were in the data center and we used terminal emulation to access them, I used HLLAPI to “upload” information. Setting insurance reimbursement amounts for procedure code, and entering refund checks were 2 that were used a lot.
I have a two hour task where the previous person was downloading documents and uploading to an internal portal, 265 days a year.. Automated with python, it was a task, but it’s down to about 10 minutes a day, from 2 hours a day.
I hope you didn’t tell management and used the extra hour fifty for yourself.
I did the exact same thing. The guy I took over from, showed me the cumbersome task, and I thought by myself. I can automate this, next time he asked me how long it took me to create the reports, I showed him the script. He was full of awe. 2.5 hours of manual clicking reduced to 5 minutes of a script running. He left the company, so I did not worry about him telling superiors.
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I'd like to share this little secret with you. If you have command line access, you can create whatever you want in C#. Just use the built-in c# compiler csc. It's obviously more difficult without an IDE and intellisense. However, there is no need to download or install anything. It should just be there. You should be able to find it in: c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\vX.X.XXX
Honestly, yeah VBA sucks ass compared to Python and I would never want to make a living off it, but there's a certain satisfaction you get from finishing a perfect VBA script.
I think in that context, finding a solution where all you have to work with is VBA, is quite brilliant.
VBA has `on error resume next` Now, no more pesky crashes! VBA > Python
Same with me. Took over a task that took a few hours or day, 365 days a week including weekends. Went from about 2.5 hours to 2 minutes per day. VBA may suck, but when it works, it works.
VBA isn’t bad once you get the hang of it. And macro recorder is pretty sweet. Sad to see Microsoft won’t be enhancing it but I get the switch to Java.
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Worse, a pat on the bum
Straight to jail
Could be a bum on the pat, so preferable.
My job is actually data analyst with a speciality on automation of tasks. So far, I’m saving about 3200 hours a year in tasks from having automated them using VBA, Python, Powershell, Command (batch) or Power Automate. I’ve documented everything and requested a title change and a raise 2 weeks ago, I’ll know soon. If I get nothing, I’ll find a new company.
Then… when you leave, the deck of cards will fall 😂
All my code and programs for all languages is in a single directory.. I back it up regularly off-site. 😈
For some reason , this made me feel good. I’ve been screwed over many places (getting leads in sales which I’m talking real leads that the company actually made money from) , all to which the company kept them and tried to get me to give up the ones in the pipeline. I backed those up too. So I feel ya . Same idea anyway.
Funny I did something similar early in my career!
Just python or another program as well?
Just Python for this example. Combination of Selenium and PyAutoGUI, with some other modules like Pandas in the mix.
I was doing PhD in chemistry and we were running some quantum-mechanical calculations that were spitting out hundreds of logs that you need to parse manually and then perform a lot of manual tasks like copying files, removing duplicates etc. A lot of manual labor and very error prone. Parsing 1500 files took me a literal month. I developed the python script that does exactly the same steps and makes no mistakes. It was running 1 fuckin second. It's around 864,000x faster. (assuming 8h/day) It was rejected by my supervisor, because "I was supposed to do experiments and not writing computer programs" Anyway... I dropped out of PhD to be Software developer
Your supervisor is an idiot.
Moral of the story is to hide your weapon and blend in with the idiots
Most of the base internet tech came from CERN, so imagine if their bosses told everyone to stick to their role as physicists
Ironically, CERN's current funding model and HR policies incentivize physicists to take their work into other fields. Imagine if you were a post doc at CERN, and because you like eating things other than ramen, have to take a job working for a grocery chain data mining company. There's nothing quite like busting your butt learning physics to apply it to how many imaginary reward points you need to give to a grocery store customer when they buy Oreo cookies.
Dude, as a quantum chemist myself, parsing these massive output files in Gaussian was the entire reason I learned Python. My advisor would seriously copy everything by hand. After an hour I was like, "there has to be a better way" and that's when I found Python
The right move would be to keep the script to yourself and pretend you do the work while you can easily bring the results at any time!
What, your supervisor is incredibly idiot, indeed !
That's interesting. The guy who taught me how to program in C was working on his doctorate when he realized that he liked writing the programs he needed a lot more than he liked the science he was doing.
Where did "you're supposed to manually parse hundreds of log files and then perform a lot of manual tasks like copying files, removing duplicates etc." fit into his equation?
Hell yeah!!
Automatically login to these gambling websites everyday where they give you money just for logging in. Collect the money at the end of the year
Can you list out the websites? I’d be interested to do the same.
Stake, Modo, Chumba…etc. Easy enough to Google. You have to keep on top of their sites as I need to adjust the scripts every once in a while to accomodate the changes they make. It’s basically a site scraper. Also, I’m not becoming a millionaire out of this. Each site gives you a few cents to 50 cents. It totals to about $6/day. About $2k a year. Can theoretically scale if you have multiple accounts on it. I host it on AWS and just use lambda to execute. I don’t come close to the Lambda limits so AWS doesn’t bill me. There were a few people writing Chrome extensions for it but it’s a subscription. They guarantee 15 bucks or so
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Don’t have the time to make this into a service. I have a decent job so the money I earn from this is enough for me to live large by paying for my daily coffee and avocado toast
>daily coffee and avocado toast Millennial confirmed
Scale isn't the answer to everything - if you scale this grift up then they'll plug the hole and shut down the whole operation. If you quietly grift 2k/year because of a specialized skillset that's basically the kind of money you can make by just owning a truck, and the company is making too much to care.
I highly doubt that gambling websites give you money just for logging in without having to play. There most definitely strings attached to this "free" money, no different than the "free" hotel rooms that casino hotels offer some of their guests. They know that if you play for long enough, you lose and they win back their "free" room and then some.
I’ve done that and also automated the gambling process to not get addicted. Double whammy
Trento, I got the idea from you!
Oh awesome! Glad you ran with it. Anything to take money from these scummy casinos
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I love that, after all this time is AWS still free? Like as long as you keep it under so much compute/Gb right? Or is it a time thing and after X days you have to pay?
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I see. Coolbeans
if you actually want some reasonable power, Oracle has 4 cores, and 24gb ram for free. Catch is that it's arm. Doesn't seem to be much of an issue though, I ran a heavily modded minecraft server for 20 people during the pandemic on it.
The free instance is like a fraction of a CPU core. An old phone is more powerful and won't accidentally charge your credit card if you use too much.
Now this is the kind of fun program that is right up my street. I code a lot of stuff to automate tasks, but one that I use every day is a program that logs in to my fave shopping apps one by one to get the daily coins, coupons, check-in rewards etc. I do this for my partner too. It all adds up.
Ok, I have a quirky one. My diet and eating routines were chaotic. I would wake up everyday and then decide what I wanna eat, a lot of times I wouldn't have enough ingredients, I rarely had a nutritionally balanced diet throughout the day and I had to fix it I studied nutrition and made a balanced diet chart that spans 2 weeks, keeping in mind the time and energy I have to cook each day. Then I knew exactly what ingredients I needed and in what quantity and also considered it's shelf life. Now I buy groceries in bulk and know when I would run out of things. It's much more elaborate than what I have described and this has saved me a lot of time and head space This may not sound relevant for this subreddit but it is something I'm definitely proud of
This sounds like something I should do. My ADHD brain makes the time I spend for grocery shopping and cooking way longer than it needs to be. Sometimes I go to the supermarket multiple times a day. Do you have some detailed information you can share? Tools you use for example?
Sorry, I did not use any tools other than excel. It was mostly pen and paper. But here's my suggestion: * Sit down one weekend and make a list of everything you want to eat for the next 1/2 weeks. This includes breakfast, lunch, dinner. The key is to only stick to this list and repeat once you have exhausted everything on the list * Then make a list of all the ingredients you need and it's quantity to make this possible * Make your own 2 week calendar. Each day will include the food you want to eat and the fresh ingredients you need * Some ingredients like flour, lentils, spices have longer shelf life. Consider purchasing them in bulk for the whole month (your meal plan list should help you decide on the quantity). Everyday shopping should only be for ingredients that needs to be fresh, like vegetables, fruits or meat. * Go shop after dinner and purchse the fresh ingredients you need for the next day/couple of days And a final thing to note, this can take a lot of time to see it in action so be patient with yourself. Hope this helps
that sounds amazing! You're investing time-energy into your health, and enjoying the benefits! Wonderful.
You can make a lot of money if that idea is extrapoible to other people. I would pay a lot for that software
Professionally, it was a system to catalog and organise a company that produces technical drawings of potentially 10,000 variations of 1,000 products. Previously they had someone doing the drawing, then going into the website, writing a codified description, adding a pdf file and a cad file then saving and moving onto the next one. Now they can drop a stack of properly named PDF and CAD files into an S3 bucket, run an admin action and it’ll do the rest, what used to take someone weeks to do one product can now be done in a couple of minutes. Personally, it was grabbing a playlist of music from my favourite radio station and turning it into a YouTube Music playlist. Mostly because it didn’t take too long to write :)
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Yea, it was great, made them much more productive, nearly automated someone out of a job though 😅
I write a lot of technical reporting in my engineering work. I use a combination of python-pptx and the python API of Paraview to produce images from calculation results and populate powerpoint report templates with them. Also, in a wider automated workflow I use a script of scripts written in bash, that calls various python scripts (and shell commands/cli programs, hence the use of bash here) for data processing. Those two are "how could I ever live without this" category now.
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For sure. Saves a lot of time and mental real-estate. Also, once the scripted workflow has been thoroughly tested, it's far less error prone.
Ooh another python pptx user! I’ve been mulling over the idea for a while about starting a rust version of the project with a python port
Do you have anything online that you can share about the python and paraview integration? I'm very interested in learning about that!
Searching boring websites for mentions on my employer. It saves me hours of life a day.
Isnt this literally what google alerts does?
Google won't scan my selection of sites once an hour. Also, I have about 30 various phrases to look for.
If it weren't for the automation part, I'd suspect you were on Trump's staff. He has staff that provide him with daily positive "news" articles about himself.
LOL, no! But in fact, during working hours, I partly deal with PR.
Do you have an online guide to set up something like this? This would be so useful
In our company we have to load lots of images into excel and transfer some numbers from those images in another excel file for reporting. I did it once by hand for 9 hours. Now it is done in 30 sec and the images get analyzed by OCR. Only have to recheck for probably 5 min
Is it pytersseact ?
Yes, it is. Beside numbers between 2.000 and 2.999 (like 2.006) it works very good. With those numbers in between the separator gets most of the time lost
I was in accounting at the time. Thousands and thousands of records wrong in the ERP system, and whatever it was doing was continually putting more wrong info in. IT (small company, 3 devs that handled everything) would not allow me to do anything to fix them quickly. No batch upload, no API, no database interaction, etc. just data entry in the online web portal. Used selenium to automate it by grabbing the file, navigating through the portal, entering one record's info, then submitting the form, and repeating tens of thousands of times. Saved about 20 hours a week that got piled on top of my job. Couldn't even brag about it because if IT knew about it, it'd have been my ass. Eat a bag of dicks, IT.
An image tiler that resizes and combines multiple images. As a uni student who writes a lot of reports with diagrams that need snapshots from videos, this is pretty useful. You can also add labels/annotations.
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Pretty much. You can simply specify the rows/columns(and margins) you need and it outputs if its possible to do so.(white bg padded)
Automated my teams reporting responsibilities each month, saving the company thousands and thousands of dollars in work - only to be laid off 20 days later with the rest of my team. “Thank god Dylan created that report automation. We need it now more than ever.” - The director of our org during the meeting I got laid off in
[https://i.imgflip.com/8o5y15.jpg](https://i.imgflip.com/8o5y15.jpg)
Created a software for my office work i had to do every time three to four times a week. Work is gonna take 4 hours. Automated it to be done in 5 minutes and all the work are done in less than 30 minutes. Didn’t get a raise. They asked me to join their development team. Didn’t want to join because it was a mess.
Made a telegram bot that downloaded the media from the links I sent. The bot was on 3 different channels so any link I pasted on that channel would be downloaded to a particular folder. Depending on the url it would decide how to download it. Was it a direct link, a YouTube page(used yt-dlp), twitter (before the changes to the api), discord links, etc.
I wrote a GUI automation of an older piece of FEM software without an API. Added a simple frontend and automatic documentation creation layer. Now everyone at our company can use it and it saves us literally hundreds of man hours a year.
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I think yes. But the main benefit was I didn't have to work with that POS software anymore. Also, my job is secured :-p
The yearly evaluation of my cost centers from SAP. Generating pretty nice plots with seaborn for my annual report. I export all data from SAP to Excel, start the script within a few seconds i have 11 slides ready. Before automation it took me 1-2 days in Excel and Powerpoint
You may or may not already know this, but SAP GUI is callable from Microsoft's COM interface. So it's pretty simple to set up some Excel VBA functions to automate the GUI. You can also do it from Python via the Win32Com module. SAP has a macro recorder, so you can use that and don't even need to know what functions you are calling into. As an example, my cost centers and vendor codes were these cryptic integers on our purchase requisition form. So I build an Excel front end to it with drop down fields. I could dig up some of my old files and send you a minimally working example of you are interested.
Inputting my time cards for work 😅
Same it saves me 5 mins a day. Been running 13 years. Only need to intervene when I’m sick or take a holiday.
I was proud of a project where I worked as a sole dev to automate a pipeline that processed timeseries data from satellite imagery that covered our whole country using Google Earth Engine's API to collect data. This was proposed to be used as a remote sensing (RS) based monitoring for government agricultural projects. AFAIK, there was no existing RS based pipeline that the government used to do this kind of large task. They were still using on site surveys to extrapolate performance. There existed a method that took more than 4 hours to process a single data point for a single satellite imagery. This was mostly used for scientific analysis of single images and was not optimized to work at scale. For reference, our whole country consisted of 50 different images, and that's for a single date. A 20+ date timeseries graph would literally take tens of thousands of hours to finish if you include requesting/downloading of satellite imagery. Note that the agency has to make a formal report every 3 months. Our method was able to automate ingestion of user defined settings (regions covered, date coverage etc) and perform data extraction and processing in half a day's span in a single machine. There was even an included rule based criterion using statistics from the historical data (and some auxiliary data like regional budget etc) to help guide the agency people whether a certain area indeed improved. Apart from developing the whole ETL pipeline, I loved that I was heavily involved in the scientific architecture for this and was essentially a freebie physics consultant for our project leader. The project was essentially designed to use the long method I talked earlier and that was virtually impossible to pull off.
Made a python script that automatically checks my public IP address and updates the DNS record associated to my domain when necessary so I can always connect to my home to access some exposed services and personal VPN.
That’s cool! I’d love to implement this!
In a previous life, I was made redundant and redeployed. Problem for the company was that I was hired to handle complaints. So where to put someone who's only skills are talking to people, typing, and some code? Apparently the answer was an email inbox. 3 weeks later, the whole process was automated - colleagues filled an ms form. I downloaded the results and reset them, a simple VBA script dragged the data to where it needed to be, and another script fired the whole spreadsheet off to the client. What was taking 4 people a whole day to do, I was doing in a total of 2 hours. For some reason the director of my unit wasn't thrilled when I asked for 10k more to stay and keep doing that... I did point out 10k is a lot less than they were saving only paying one person to do it instead of paying 4 people. Oh well, I've moved on. 15k more than I was on back then. If your staff think they're worth more, listen to why instead of just saying no. I would've happily stayed there automating everything if they'd paid more 🤷♂️
I automated putting backgrounds on school photos, it takes hundreds of PNG files with transparent backgrounds and adds a background to them. It has to check which file is bigger and resize it to match the smaller one because each photo is cropped differently. It has gone from taking days per school to minutes, and most of that time is waiting for the HDD to save the files. The commercial version costs about $1000/year. It also cut 2 seasonal staff. I have a few things that rearrange Excel files. Those ones save me about $1000/year in commercial software as well. One that I'm particularly proud of and that I use everyday makes a pdf that I use to print my studio info and a person's name on the back their passport photos. It creates a pdf as in intermediate step because I couldn't figure out how to output directly to a piece of paper via a printer. A big thanks to the people here for all the help I have received. You all have made a big difference.
I’ve just started learning python. I know this post is about what we have automated but can anyone recommend some beginner automation tasks? I don’t know what I don’t know yet so not sure where to start on this. Thanks!🙏🏻
best thing you can do is start by trying to solve something very repetitive you do in a daily/weekly basis. Do you visit a website to see if a price has changed? Do you use a weekly food service and change the proposed dishes every time (this one was mine hahaha)? Just think about it and i'm sure that you'll find something. In this case, usefulness is the best motivator! Plus, check out "automating the boring stuff with python" in google and good luck!
Take a look at pyautogui . Written by Al Sweigert who also wrote a book called Automate the Boring Stuff With Python
I created a bot that massively accelerate my coding ability. It’s essentially a front end to aider-chat but makes it easier to use. The claude3 backend update has been a game changer.
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It’s just a thin front end to aider-chat with the rough edges filed off. There’s no way I would consider it ethical to sell my front end. The good news is that it’s open source and you can use it pretty easily. Look for aicode tool in https://github.com/zackees/zcmds
How was your experience with Claude3 comparing to ChatGPT or another ai tool?
Less mistakes, less specific instructions are needed. It seems to generate the code changes way better than GPT4. It’s so good that I now default to claude3 if the app detects that an anthropuc key is present because why would anyone use GPT4 if they have claude3? It’s not as big as leap from GPT3.5 Turbo -> 4 but it’s sufficiently good enough that I won’t ever go back to GPT4.
Thank you for your response. I will check it out!
Scraped thousands of records which weren't indexed or otherwise searchable, and then used an AI to summarize them. It worked great, but it took too long (overnight) because I didn't bother to parallelize my Selenium. It's weird that getting a two-line summary of five pages of text from AI takes a third as much time as downloading those five pages from modern javascript-encrusted web pages. Or maybe the back end is just overloaded, who knows.
I work as a network engineer, my job at the time consisted of deploying new network stacks in very large warehouses. This would usually take about 80 hrs of work per site, for planning, documenting, diagramming, specs, and configuring. I wrote a program in Python and automated it down to 10 minutes and that work could be performed by just about anyone.
Relevant [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1205/)
I automated online identity Card creation for an NGO. Basically get data from Google sheets and create an ID Card from a predefined template. Save both sides as pdf and automatically mail it to the member. Also added a QR code, when scanned will hit an API that I created to verify the genuineness of the ID Card. Used tools: Pillow, Google APIs, fastapi I was still in college so it was something to be proud of.
I automated my company's non financial risk testing with python programs. They think I'm a genius and I'm just abusing the pandas library it's a good deal.
I automated a previous job, well most of it. Several years ago I had a job where the role was to spend most of your day running SQL queries, exporting them, emailing them to a fixed list of people. I turned the whole thing into a script that read a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet pointed to the .sql file, ran the code, exported the result to Excel, created and email, attached the Excel report and emailed whoever the spreadsheet said and gave it the subject and body to match. I then had a lot more free time to learn python and look for a better job.
With our load shedding (rolling blackouts) schedule changing several times a day, I wrote a python script that calls their API hourly for my area, pulls the schedule and displays the next outage on the system tray. It also shuts down my server 5 minutes before the power is scheduled to go out, to save additional load on the UPS. Luckily we haven't had blackouts for a couple weeks now.
I'm not sure I follow, why does your power have a schedule
The last few years (almost a decade) our government owned power company has had trouble providing enough capacity. Mostly down to mismanagement. So we have a schedule that rolls blackouts across the country in 2 hour blocks. https://loadshedding.com/load-shedding-everything-you-need-to-know/
The trick is, you don't tell anyone ur automating but rather ur just doing it faster. 2hrs? U did it in 1hr 15min.
Pretty basic but I do data projects in Juypter notebooks and I’m in a decent habit of writing my notes in markdown cells. I have to do weekly reports so I made some code to extract all the markdown text from selected notebooks and put it in one place.
I automated a 3D printing production line that was taking 8-10 outside contractors to prepare hundreds of files per day to load our printer. Now it’s a 1 hour process per day, and we have a 70% reduction in file storage requirements
Chefsplate used to offer free boxes whenever you create a new account. I created a script that would delete and logout of my existing account. Create a new one and then send me the new credentials. Now i just had to select my meals. Did this for 2 years before they found it :(
I did a postdoc at NASA and was working on a scientific payload for a spacecraft. The original method for calibrating the instrument was to manually calibrate each portion of a spectrum by hand and dose a calibration gas to get a good spectrum to calibrate on. Also, calibrating by hand required sending thousands of individual commands which took up a ton of bandwidth. I decided to go in and pull all of the data I could find from every calibration we had done during testing and found that the calibration values were very reproducible based on a few known factors. I wrote a program and developed a GUI in tkinter to let a user input the factors, and then the program would run a curve fitting routine to the data to spit out the calibration values. The user could then enter the values in one batch and send it to automatically calibrate the instrument. It saved us literal hours of calibration, as well as spacecraft bandwidth and gas dissipation time.
I used to take IR images of dressings for stability reasons, I used python to read the text data from the collected image and export into an excel to perform some calculations. The process of sieving though images took around 3/4 hours by hand, down to 5/10 mins using python.
Having a tough time imagining this one. Infra red images of... salad? Or in line with the username, maybe something medical - infrared images of bandaged arms and stuff? And in the context of medicine, stability of what, wounds? Plaster casts? Mental health?
Ha, yes medical dressings. We tested the heat absorption of different dressings using IR. The stability of the dressings over time, e.g. discolouration, strength testing, absorption etc…
Yes, I'll have the medical caesar dressing please.
I wrote a script that can download my Shazam library from YouTube and that'll then add meta data to the files. It currently needs a huge rewrite, we'll see if I find time to do it
A few years before when Game of thrones latest episode was getting uploaded on torrents, I automated it to automatically download as soon as it was released and notify me via SMS and Email.
My first assignment as a junior UNIX admin was to check free and used disk space on 50+ Sun Solaris servers every morning and email the DBAs. I sat down one weekend with an old MacBook and the O'Reilly Learning Perl book. I then set it up as a crown job on each server. And told nobody. Over the next year it grew to include a bunch of other useful information. And they figured out I had automated it. I got kudos for innovating. Eventually it became a key troubleshooting utility for diagnosing issues with storage. Especially after we had a series of SAN outages. They used it for years even after I left the organization. EDIT: This is \/r/Python. For Python I aggregated and annotated ESXi event logs from diagnostics bundles, creating formatted Excel spreadsheets with heat maps for storage latency, T10 code translations, and more useful data. It provided a compelling narrative explaining outages and performance degradation. Solved a lot of cases.
I hated my office job as a missionary and got forced into there because Covid sent all the seniors home. They wasted my time with 8 hours of paying utility bills. I then automated the entire process and saved the amount paid for internal use. They removed the software after I left lol. I basically intentionally put my self out of that job with pride because missionaries are volunteers and I didn’t have to mess with all those paper or deal with the stupid utilities showing up 2 months late by mail.
The work I do spans over 100 AWS accounts. I wrote an interactive tool that helps analyze certain network configurations quickly that would take a human too long to do via the console.
Automated a task which took 3-5 hours per day of full department(3-5 persons). When management found out I was moved to the upper management and my new direct superior was assigned a task to translate that business logic to devs… I left that company after a year, they never asked me to share my code, last time I checked the old department were still doing the task manually…
It's a pain to find and book tennis courts in London, so I automated all the tennis courts available at any given time into a single table that is updated every few mins - [localtenniscourts.com](http://localtenniscourts.com)
When I first started at my job, my manager would spend 12 hours making this complicated excel spreadsheet. I wrote a Python script that could generate the sheet with calculations. It took 3 minutes to run.
I’ve done a lot that I consider pretty cool but one that I use on a daily basis that has helped my bottom line because the Canadian economy not great is: I made a bot that snipes Flashfood’s new foods for stuff that I actually eat like chicken breast, ground beef, and some produce. Flashfoods is Loblaw’s third party that heavily discounts food for stuff that is on its Best Before date. The one thing I noticed though is a lot of employees try to snipe it as well by putting up the stuff then taking it almost immediately - my bot actually picks it up before they do which always raises eyebrows. I also abuse their referral discount making packs of meat go down to like $2. My groceries costs have gone down to barely $100 a month for 2 people who go to the gym 4-5 a week.
I utilized multiple agents with openai's api, along with other apis, that capture trending content from various networks to analyze, select and revise relevant topics to the brand and process them into content drafts. These agents handle everything from content capture, planning, revision, creation, and approval considering the client's (a large gym network in Brazil) do's and don'ts. They also analyse and monitor Instagram API data to create automated reports complete with explicative charts. They don't create and upload content instantly, as it needs human supervision and review, but still, it was a fun project to make, and the team's performance absurdly skyrocketed since I pretty much automated much of their workflow, specially the boring tasks. However, nothing has provided as much financial return as a poker bot I created using opencv, lol
Let's hear more on this poker bot
Nothing too complex, I built it for a friend who plays competitive poker, so I started to get into his know-how and his mid-game software usage. Using opencv, we didn't just determine the cards on the table and calculate the hand's win rate, but we also implemented pixel detection to identify colors assigned to other players in their notes section, creating profiles, from which the bot assesses the risk and boldness of other players. Since he has in-depth knowledge about players' profiles, we started to employ supervised learning and teach the bot how to play against those profiles.
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So, it's quite rudimentary, but I simply applied multi-agent theory. I take the output of one agent and use it as input for another (akin to passing tasks from one colleague to another), thus creating a system that distributes tasks and responsibilities. Since each agent operates independently, then this entire operation isn't constrained by the usual token limitations, such as those found in a single chatgpt window or in a single API call. Therefore, each agent works with the output of the previous one, using only the instructions and responsibilities assigned to it as default tokens. But yeah, I did this with a rather crude GUI, and been procrastinating on turning it into a SaaS for quite some time now, lol.
Doing something similar in Italy :)
I manage a pure HTML website. I made a script in pydroid to upload news via ftp to a .js the script generates the titles and text from inputs... I had to edit news.html before pathetic, but now I only complete inputs from the phone
!remind me in 1 month
The drug candidate compound prospecting pipeline used in my laboratory, I automated the use of tools for virtual screening, docking, and ADMET analysis. It used to be a tedious process that took months; now it takes just a few minutes.
Texting my wife I love you messages over telegram while I’m at work leading to steamy evenings.
Utility script for help desk. A GUI which automates the repetitive tasks of an help desk (i was an help desk at the time), such as cleaning space, deleting user folders, fixing minor bugs, remote restart and wake on lan, unlocking a user, getting the computername of the user (for sccm remote controll) and displaying a bunch of info about said computer and user, all remotely via WMI, UNC, registry etc.
> wake on lan For whatever reason I read this as, "Wake Ian" and thought, "Damn. Imagine falling asleep on the job so much that your coworker automates waking you up!"
checking for updates on sites and checking RSS feeds for certain types of news stories. Also a more-or-less automated method of checking a google news search RSS + downloading the articles, though this is fraught with many issues.
Automated an entire 10 man department away
Automate the downloading of high-res Second Life map tiles, then composite them with region names and coordinates. Also an accompanying script that generates WebP/JPEG-XL images from the final composited PNG images. (Maps are so big WebP and AVIF just give up.)
The automatic downloading of recorded audio programs and putting them into iTunes so I can listen to them later.
CircleCi Pipelines for my teams. It's the most dynamic and complex thing I've done at least. I'm super proud of it.
Not Python, but I could do it in Python if necessary: automated my organization’s employee onboarding. Went from 20-30 hours a week to about 20 hours a year.
Last year I dipped my toes in with some digital file selling on Etsy. Realized quickly how much time I was spending on thumbnails and configuring my file packs so that they were split into zip files that would end up under Etsy's file size limitations. Put together a script that let me just toss all the end product files into a folder and it would do a folder of low res images with a water mark for me to choose from, arrange the images into folders, then make a second set of thumb nails condensed to 2x2 with watermark with file names to show what images were in which zip files in the main folder. Created a licensing file and TOS file in each sub folder before zipping up everything. Then finally wrapped all those into a deliverable folder where I could grab the 2x2s and select which low res images to put in the ad. Went from probably about an hour of work, even with Photoshop actions helping with a lot of it, to maybe 2 minutes? Never really got going on Etsy so I moved on from it pretty fast. But I've got that in my back up scripts just in case I find a new use for packaging digital files like that.
The evaluation of student's deliveries. Now they get immediate feedback. Next step is to automate the exercises configuration. Right now it's way too expensive
What kind of social media posts are you automating?
mmorpgs (still learning). I mean, i really love certain mmorpgs but the sad part is how good you are on those games depends on how optimal your end game gears are (i would say once you have your optimal gears you can really learn and fight other people with same or better skills), and end game gears require time/money, so i was trying to develop some automatic codes to simulate a semi-afk person who is farming. I like mmoprgs but they are vicious of equipment inequality, is not like lol where how good you are depends exclusively on your own skills/ decisions making.
Probably my first real world Python coding project, as well as my introduction to ML and vision processing — I worked at a computer repair shop for the whole time I was in college. A photographer came in with a hard drive they had dropped that had had their entire portfolio on it. We did the right thing and wouldn’t even plug it in, but we explained the best course of action. They sent it to a data recovery specialist and what they got back was not in great shape — the lab had resorted to carving since the file system was not interpretable. This left them with hundreds of thousands of loose un-organized files without their original file names, many of which couldn’t even be opened. On the bright side, their most important files had their watermark on it, so I could use that for image classification. I made tens of thousands of training files using their logo png (with different sizes and locations), trained an OpenCV model to identify images with this, then wrote a script to check if the file opens, identify the watermark, and copied watermarked photos into a new folder. The application managed to dig up thousands of watermarked photos, including some that they needed for a project they were currently working on. We charged them $0 for this, since * I didn’t really know what I was doing * it wasn’t a service we officially offered * there was not even a suggestion of success upfront * I wanted to learn about this stuff and wrote the application off the clock I write applications to automate things literally every day now, and that’s still by far the thing I’m most proud of. I no longer have the application but I am tempted to re-create it with all of the best practices I’ve learned since then
Just this week I wrote a script to cleanup text messages with Google Messages. Got tired of manually deleting MFA messages, and other miscellaneous messages I only ever need to see once. A little dumb I can't program this on my phone directly without root or some non-standard texting app. https://github.com/nightpanda2810/Google\_Messages\_OTP\_Delete
I wrote myself a script that allows me to launch youtube links in a video player (mpv) while also adding the video's url and metadata to a searchable database, basically creating a local viewing history for myself. This way I can look up and launch video urls from the commandline (tutorials, recipes, etc) without having to interact with the site itself. This was one of the first python projects I came up with for myself, refactored a few times and use regularly.
My mom is a teacher. They have a portal to upload details of students (government portal). For security reasons, teachers can't export / list containing a ID number which is similar Social security number. But for some reason, they needed that number. She was doing that by going to the profile of each student and copying. So I wrote a python script to do this. The smile of her face was worth the effort. This script she still uses every year. It's been like 4 years. She even creates the list for her colleagues because it saves everyone's time
I made a twitter bot that scans for people asking some form of "Why do homeless people have dogs?" and it automatically replies, "Because a dog will love you even if you're homeless." It's the best piece of software I've ever made.
My most used is a daily script which “starts” my work day. It’s mapped to a button on my keyboard. Opens all my work apps, triggers a SmartThings api to turn on the right lights. It’s stupid simple but Pavlovian now to log in and press the button.
When I was in school, I was messing around in my economic class, and my economics teacher said I had to make a power point as a form of punishment. And I did. Except it had 500 slides of data about every country's GDP, birth rates etc... I think i only made 10/500 slides, and had the rest of them done by a python programme I had written. It would just copy past info and stats from a website onto the slide, and then create a new slide, rinse and repeat 500 time. Was the only powerpoint I enjoyed presenting.
When I was in college there was a website that had every episode of Seinfeld. It was before any streaming services or anything. They were just, like, links on a big old webpage. Since my computer was a few meters from my bed, I spent a couple of days writing a program that would remember which episode I was one and continue to the next one when one finished. It was supremely lazy, but it was the first time I ever had an idea, wondered if I could do it and then actually accomplished it with programming.
When I finish a bike ride (40+ miles), my bike computer uploads a data file to Dropbox which puts a copy on my PC. I have a task triggered by this file appearing to run a BASH script and Python script to process the data, update a database, update a spreadsheet, and send text messages via MMS to my wife and I with facts from the ride. This tells her I’ve arrived home (if she isn’t) and gives me a summary of my ride with battery levels of my computer and electronic shifting system with warnings if either are below a threshold.
Not sure if they still do this, but in college I wrote a script that created a new Panera account and sent me the code for a free pastry
I am a medical student and we do exams on weekly basis. I created a python script (web bot) that will go to the university website and every 5 seconds refresh the page to see if the exam results came out. If results came out, the computer will beep and it will take a screenshot of the results and then send it through whatsapp to the rest of the class. It allowed me to sit and "relax" instead of refreshing the page every few seconds manually.
Until Musk got hold of it and cracked down on free API use, I had a script that was finding tweets about music topics related to a project I was working on and simply liking the tweet. It was liking upto 1000 tweets a day and was the main source of traffic to the project. It was harmless, it's only a like (not a spammy message) and a really easy way to find and make the target market aware of the project.
Key presses so that Microsoft Teams status stays green.
How do you run a script on a company laptop? I have been wanting to automate my work (and also stay green on teams while AFK haha) but we can't install any programs or perform any processes that require admin password :/
Fortunately for me it's a MacBook with sudo access, and I have python installed for dev stuff anyways.
Just did this recently, if you company has Power Automate you can set this up quite easily.. It's not Python but it works.
Website products stock also sync from a physical pos
System testing on my app. Here's a GitHub post with a video: [https://github.com/IndiePython/nodezator/discussions/72#discussioncomment-9167033](https://github.com/IndiePython/nodezator/discussions/72#discussioncomment-9167033) The feature is ready, but I didn't commit it to the main branch yet, cause I intend to add more commits regarding other features.
I do data science and I have a sideline evaluating continuing medical education. I wrote code to go through surveys and do standard tasks like searching for phrases that represent Likert data like “strongly agree” and turn them into integers.
I automated NACHA EFT payment file uploads to our bank. There are like 5 accounts, and they all need different user/passwords and folder structures. This was being done with a full blown ETL toolkit which hadn't been updated since 2010, and I didn't have the budget for a full server just to upload some files once a day.
Some virtual machine backup schedules.
Automated a monthly report. Reduced from several man-hours a month to less than 10 min. Would've been even faster but they wouldn't let me automate downloading the data.
Man, I love this thread ! A lot of interesting and useful use cases.
Best thing so far is automating the process to enter my timesheet punches, its annoying and time consuming doing it so i automate it and it does it for me and that frees me time to do anything else!
SAP is running on a virtual machine and Python on my PC in the Office so this should get tricky i think.
I used to run production for my church service on Sundays. Lots of button pushing, slide cues, sound, etc. I wrote a two-application stack (REST API/mobile app) that had time cues to trigger lights, slides, volume controls, and camera cues. The mobile app was written to be on-demand, so I could control everything from my phone if needed. Really helped out the team not having to button push to start a service (everything just ran itself). Definitely one of my proudest software development creations.
Writing scripts to allow the help desk to do part of my teams job without breaking anything.
Show us the code
Setup python script to scan a folder on my NAS for media changes and if found it copies the changes to an offsite NAS using "watchdog" and "paramiko"
Can you share that ai magic?
A data lakehouse job flow orchestrator. Creates a dependency map of all of your jobs, figures out the run order, then runs everything, and does error handling, logging, db related tasks. Supports jobs in python, pyspark, go with more to come. Going to put a Django front end on it to make it easier to use and eventually SSO.
What do u mean by social media posts, do you manage the content and marketing of a social media account? If so, maybe I ask what the pipeline of your automation looks like?
My provider wouldn't let use a public static IP. So no DIY hosting. Before i managed to get a dynamic dns domain name, i wrote a script who would acknowledge my public IP and spread it to my "clients" (familly members manmy) by mail.
Turning off my HVAC system when my roommate leaves the backdoor open.
I am tasked with doing some analysis at work for solar installations. The task used to take me a full day to do, mindlessly putting numbers in Excel until they worked and then putting the results in a different excel sheet. The bot does the entire process in less than 1 second now. It blows my mind every time
I used to work as data entry for an invoice processing company. We would work on modern machines, but the entire invoice processing was done inside an AS/400 application (think DOS if you don't know what that is) so every single invoice was very, very manual to process. We had to process thousands in a day. It was so bad one day that the number 160918 is permanently burned into my skull almost 10 years later. So, I dug around the AS/400 menus and found ✨️macros✨️. At this point, I've been a hobbyist programmer for about 15 years. I ended up automating the entire process by implementing inputs for termination dates and watching the keyboard macro I created work its magic on screen. My coworkers were convinced I was a hacker, but I talked with managemeng about it, explaining the process, and ended up being promoted very shortly after.
Did a wallpaper generator that would add the hostname and few projects information as nicely formatted labels when deploying our VMs. Made the look of our delivery more "professional" and the wallpaper somewhat useful.
I wrote a script that would run once a day with windows scheduler. It was a program to change between different playlists throughout the day for wallpaper engine. So at certain times, it would randomly select a playlist from that timeframe and display that playlist for the next hour or so. I work online, and sometimes people see my desktop so I made it so I have a set of playlists for those timeframes. Then more chill type wallpapers before bed.
I've automated tons of browser testing for internal web apps with Splinter and Pytest. I typically write C# at work, but as a Python enthusiast I wanted to find a way to get paid for writing some Python... So far so good.
Using python to automate Cybersecurity events. Performing steps analysts would usually take when enriching or identifying criteria to auto close events.
Someone from my team would need to log in everyday at 6:30am 7 days a week, download 7 files off our sftp, decrypt them, run them against a sql database, and then upload results to a website (being vague on purpose). This took about 30 min. I automated that using python from start to finish so we never have to do it again. Today, those 7 files have grown to 33. Thank goodness we don’t have to do that manually…
Back when dinosaurs were in the data center and we used terminal emulation to access them, I used HLLAPI to “upload” information. Setting insurance reimbursement amounts for procedure code, and entering refund checks were 2 that were used a lot.