Automating your business or personal life in 2016

I've always had a warm fuzzy feeling when it comes to automating things and in the recent years I've seen a new type of developer service gaining traction that makes it really ease to automate stuff.

So this was me a few years ago

Hey, I can automate that with this piece of code. It's so easy!

Then as the years went and I grew a beard

Do we really need to write code for this? Why must things be so hard!

Fortunately for us grumps, we no longer have to!

Scott Hanselman was the one to open my eyes to this world. In an excellent video he demonstrates the real life case of an automobile repair shop that wanted to send out an SMS when the car was ready for pickup. They were running a really old system and hiring coders to develop this custom integration would be quite costly to create and maintain.

With a few clicks and drag'n'drop, Scott hooked up an Azure logic app to monitor their SQL database for new rows, and when a Status column changed value to "Done" it would automatically grab the contact info from the same row and send out an SMS to the customer with a personalized message using the customer's name and car model. Not a single code involved, no redeployments of services and immediate business value added to their shop. This is great!

I couldn't find the original video, but here is a similar one.

Automation services

Zapier

supports an impressive 500+ APIs out of the box and has all the popular services you can think of like Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive, Office 365. They recently got support for the much anticipated multi-step and supports scheduling with relative or absolute delays between actions. Their UI used to be real clunky and awkward, but they made great improvements lately.

I still find it disappointing they have a hard limit of scheduling actions more than 1 month into time, which makes it harder to follow up on things like 12 month warranties on purchased products, but with Mandrill's built-in scheduling I can work around that for at least emailing.

Azure logic apps 

is pretty new, but started out great with multi-steps built in from the start. They still don't support scheduling or delays, but I can only imagine this will be added soon. Their API integrations are very limited compared to Zapier, but has great support for Microsoft services and do support generic HTTP request integrations so you can talk to just about any HTTP API with a bit of customization.

IFTT (If This Then That)

focuses on the end user and allow users to share automation recipes for automating your personal life. Examples include posting to Slack when you enter the office in the morning or muting the phone at bedtime.

I'm missing some business oriented features, such as custom integrations with my own apps and APIs multi-step recipes and scheduling. According to their help page custom integrations are being developed.

Amazon AWS Data Pipeline 

is a service I haven't personally tested yet, as I don't use Amazon much. From their landing page it seems to focus on automating workflows between your services and manipulating data.


So what are you waiting for? Start automating your business and/or life.