Best of Automation — June 2024

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Article
DEV·2y
I built my first SaaS - NotiFast
NotiFast is a versatile notification bot designed to alert users about changes on websites they follow, such as new items or content updates. Built on the Discord platform, it offers seamless notifications without requiring user authentication and integrates easily with Discord's payment system. Initially derived from the open-source project webscraper-bot, NotiFast aims to simplify webpage monitoring with an easy-to-use visual creator. A free beta is currently available for the first 100 users.
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Article
Medium·2y
10 Best Practices for Data Science
This post discusses 10 best practices for data science, including starting and staying organized, using version control, separating notebooks and source files, writing tests and sanity checks, automating the data pipeline, centralizing important parameters, making project runs verbose, and starting with a simple end-to-end pipeline. These practices promote reproducibility, collaboration, reliability, and efficiency in data science projects.
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Article
DEV·2y
How I automated all the elegant 💩 code required to extend a feature 🧑‍💻
Learn how the author automated the process of generating redundant code and saved hours of work. Discover the motivation behind automating code generation and the challenges faced in the process.
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Article
ITNEXT·2y
6 Essential Linux Command Line Tools for DevOps Engineers
DevOps engineers rely heavily on various command line tools to manage deployments, automate tasks, and troubleshoot issues effectively. This guide highlights six essential Linux command-line tools every DevOps engineer should master: yq for parsing and modifying YAML files, sed and grep for updating configurations, curl for checking deployment statuses, tee for logging deployment steps, watch for real-time monitoring, and journalctl for viewing system logs. Mastery of these tools can significantly boost productivity and efficiency in handling complex DevOps tasks.
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Article
ITNEXT·2y
Infrastructure as Code Landscape Overview 2024
The landscape of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is rapidly evolving with numerous new tools emerging. This overview categorizes various IaC tools into groups such as core resource CRUD tools, CLI-based orchestrators, cloud management platforms, and developer platforms, among others. Special attention is given to declarative resource-oriented provisioning tools and new innovations in the field, including AI-centric tools. Discussion focuses on the differentiation within these categories and questions regarding the adoption and effectiveness of these tools.
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Video
Community Picks·2y
Ansible Full Course 2024 | Ansible Tutorial For Beginners | Ansible Complete Tutorial | Simplilearn
Ansible is a powerful automation tool for managing and configuring computer systems, saving time and resources by supporting infrastructure as code. It is favored in roles such as DevOps engineer, system administrator, and cloud engineer due to its ability to streamline tasks and improve scalability. Ansible automates IT setups, ensures consistent configuration, and enables automated deployment through its push configuration model, using easy-to-learn YAML language for writing scripts. Ansible Tower provides a GUI for easier management. The post also includes a tutorial on installing and using Ansible, highlighting its effectiveness in real-world applications like at HootSuite.
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Article
Substack·2y
What Would You Do If You Had 8 Years Left to Live?
The post explores the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and outlines four key factors contributing to it: investment, processing power, algorithms, and data. It discusses the potential timeline for reaching AGI by 2027 and the subsequent societal impacts, including mass job displacement and economic shifts. The author shares personal reflections on how to live life with the possibility of AGI-induced societal upheaval and suggests potential investment strategies to navigate the AI-driven future.
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Article
Community Picks·2y
Puppeteer in PHP for Web Scraping: Step-by-Step Tutorial
Learn how to use Puppeteer with PHP to automate browser tasks such as web scraping and testing. This tutorial covers the setup of PuPHPeteer, basic scraping techniques, handling dynamic content with infinite scrolling, and exporting data to a CSV file. Additionally, it provides strategies to avoid being blocked by anti-bot solutions using techniques like setting user agents and proxies. Advanced interactions including clicking elements and taking screenshots are also demonstrated.
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Article
Community Picks·2y
zoonru/puphpeteer: A Puppeteer bridge for PHP, supporting the entire API.
PuPHPeteer is a bridge that allows PHP developers to use Puppeteer's API for web automation and scraping, leveraging Node.js resources via the Rialto package. Key features include running Puppeteer methods in PHP, handling errors, managing timeouts, and using Puppeteer plugins. Installation requires both Composer and npm commands. Adaptations for PHP syntax include method aliases and the JsFunction class for JavaScript functions.
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Article
Watercooler·2y
AI doing the things I didn't want it to do
Prioritizing human creativity and expression over menial tasks in a world where technology is taking over.
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Article
Piccalilli·2y
How I’m using “AI”
The author explores the uses of 'AI' in their day-to-day work, including working with React components, taking meeting notes, doing boring tasks, and answering simple questions. They do not consider 'AI' as a revolution, but acknowledge its usefulness as a spicy autocomplete.
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Article
CircleCI·2y
Pytest: Getting started with automated testing for Python
This post introduces pytest, a popular and easy-to-use testing framework for Python applications. It covers the key features and benefits of using pytest, as well as how to write tests effectively. It also highlights the importance of continuous integration in the testing process.
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Article
KDnuggets·2y
The Impact of AI on the Tech Industry
AI is rapidly changing various industries, with significant benefits like increased efficiency, personalized customer experiences, and enhanced cybersecurity. However, it also raises concerns such as job displacement and ethical issues regarding data privacy. Businesses and policymakers need to address these challenges responsibly to fully harness AI's potential.
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Article
Spacelift·2y
Using Ansible to Automate AWS [Tutorial]
Ansible is a powerful open-source automation tool ideal for configuration management, infrastructure provisioning, and application deployment, particularly in AWS environments. It offers benefits such as idempotent task execution, no need for additional software on managed nodes, and modular architecture for extensibility. The post covers topics like setting up authentication, provisioning infrastructure, configuring dynamic inventories, managing configurations at scale, building AWS images, and using AWS Systems Manager. It also highlights best practices, including avoiding hardcoding of sensitive information and leveraging AWS-specific modules for efficient cloud management.
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Article
Towards Data Science·2y
From Code to Insights: Software Engineering Best Practices for Data Analysts
This post provides software engineering best practices for data analysts. It covers key lessons, such as code readability, automation of repetitive tasks, mastering tools, managing environments, optimizing program performance, DRY principle, leveraging testing, using version control systems, seeking code reviews, and staying up-to-date.
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Article
Community Picks·2y
Writing a GraphQL Backend by Hand is Long Gone
Building a GraphQL backend by hand comes with challenges such as complexity, performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and reliability issues. GraphQL is more like SQL than REST or gRPC. The future of GraphQL is moving towards generalized automated solutions and standardization.
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Article
Community Picks·2y
Why CLIs are STILL important
Command Line Interfaces (CLIs) remain essential for developers, despite the prevalence of graphical interfaces. They offer speed for repetitive tasks, enable efficient remote access, and facilitate automation in CI/CD pipelines. Cyclops, a developer-focused Kubernetes platform, benefits from the simplicity and speed of a CLI. The community effort has produced 'cyctl', a new CLI package for Cyclops, underscoring the power of open-source collaboration.
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Article
Machine Learning News·2y
Micro Agent: An AI Agent that Writes and Fixes Code for You
Micro Agent is an AI tool that automates the code generation and fixing process, eliminating the need for manual intervention. It supports different AI models and offers a practical solution for improving the reliability and efficiency of AI-generated code.
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Article
DEV·2y
5 Quick Fixes for Power Automate
Discover five quick fixes for common issues in Power Automate, including fixing conditions not showing inputs, managing connection naming, solving cancelled loop run log visibility, enabling switch copy-paste, and improving expression and array handling.
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Article
Medium·2y
The Secret to Success in Large-Scale Data Engineering Projects
This post explores how Databricks Asset Bundles (DABs) can be used for workflow implementation and automation in Databricks. It highlights the advantages of DABs in managing large-scale data projects and provides a step-by-step guide for deploying DABs.
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Article
Hacker News·2y
DrDroidLab/PlayBooks: Runbook automation platform with deep observability integrations & Jupyter-notebooks style interface
Enrich your Slack alerts with contextual observability data, automate preliminary investigations in production using PlayBooks. Configure a playbook to auto-trigger based on a Slack alert and receive automated investigation summary in the Slack thread. The tool supports fetching 50+ types of enrichment data from different sources. Access the PlayBooks portal at localhost.
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Article
Lobsters·2y
terraform plan -light
A proposed solution to reduce the duration of Terraform plans by targeting only the resources modified in code with the 'terraform plan -light' flag.
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Article
Community Picks·2y
Ship Faster, Fix Less: A Guide to Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is a software testing approach that ensures high-quality software delivery by testing applications at every stage of the development life cycle. It helps catch bugs early, reduces rework, accelerates software delivery, improves code quality, and enhances user experience. Some challenges of continuous testing include lack of test support in software, absence of standard tools, insufficient testing infrastructure, and scalability issues.
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Article
Collections·2y
Understanding Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Enhancements, Applications, and Evaluation
Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced NLP but often struggle with maintaining accuracy and relevance in rapidly changing environments. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and its advanced variant, Agent-Based RAG (Agentic RAG), address this by incorporating real-time information retrieval and intelligent agents. RAG dynamically retrieves and integrates external data to enhance LLMs without retraining. Agentic RAG introduces specialized agents coordinated by a meta-agent for improved task performance, scalability, and fault tolerance. Advanced RAG techniques like PlanRAG enhance decision-making, and RAG systems are already improving applications across various industries like healthcare and legal.
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Article
Hacker News·2y
a blog by biggiemac42
The 24-Hour Challenge for Opus Magnum involves solving 1000 puzzles within a day, pushing participants to create automated solvers due to the infeasibility for humans to complete them all manually. An initial test drop of 100 puzzles allows preparation before the main event on October 20, 2024. Competitors will aim to optimize solutions based on Cost, Cycles, and Area metrics. The post also discusses alternative strategies including human effort and hybrid approaches, along with a detailed scoring system to crown the winner.
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