Do less for more: how to automate your work
After joining HK01.com as the Head of DevOps, my time flies :)
Compared to my previous work at 9GAG (as an engineer), now my time usually spends on the communication between product development team and my team, and sometimes among the product development teams as well. It is quite painful for me (especially in the first few months) since I am not a person who goods at memorising things under heavy context-switching. Hence some routine duties are sometimes skipped, for example, forget to approve teammate’s annual leave. Indeed it is pretty bad for a team lead always forget his teammate’s good.
As a developer, I want to engineer it out. and I decide to make some routine tasks automated. Say I would like to copy attachment to Dropbox when client send me the requirement spec. Imagine I can prepare the following automated task recipes, or in Zapier terms: Zaps
And It will do the routine tasks automatically without manual operation.
Instead of write some real code, and also to save my time, I did some research on those IFTTT-like platform, including
and finally I choose Zapier (even I have to pay USD $20 per month). While there are feature limited Zapier free plan and also generous free plan from Microsoft Flow, I decide to pay because of the follwing four reasons:
- Multi-Step Zap
Unlike IFTTT, you can create a Zap with multiple steps, instead of a trigger (IF) and an single action (THEN DO). For example, you can check if the email body matches certain pattern before forwarding it to Slack, and even do other action. It makes it more programmable. - A strong ecosystem of trigger / action
Zapier gives out integration more than 1000+ application (compared to 200 application in Microsoft Flow) - Enable to run JavaScript code (and Python code)
There are simple logic blocks like Filter, it is still hard to implement complex logic. With the Javascript code block, I can show off my (limited) programming skill in JavaScript. I can do regular expression match, complex string operation, etc. I can even create a chatbot in Zapier via regex. - Simplicity
There are competitors like integromat providing similar feature (sometimes competitors are even more feature), but still Zapier is still my favourite since the UI is so simple and I can use it without reading much documentation.
Currently I have 19 active Zaps: some reminder Zaps, some routine check Zaps (eg. check if the server infrastructure is running properly), some chatbot Zaps that answer simple questions from the end users. And it is great to save some time and doing something more important / impact.
Let’s do less for more.
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HK01 is looking for talented engineers, check more at https://bit.ly/2I0YN5r
