Automation

Robot Looking Into Screen

The concept of “automation” started long ago in my life. This would be around ~2003 and in India, we had this internet plan of free data overnight. I used to download stuff, relying on getting up early to stop the download so as to now download after the “free” time was over but I failed at getting up early in the morning (never really been an early riser). Then, I wrote a script to shut down the computer at a certain time in the morning! Them times.

I recently moved to Berlin and was seeking to play Football. I found a group that was consistent enough for me (still looking for an indoor only group as well though) but this group has a lot of people and most (if not all) notifications for me are closed (because I am very mindful about content consumption — will cover this in a separate post), I end up on the waitlist. I thought about automating this.

Enter FootyBot

I write software for a living and my immediate instinct was to have a software (bot or something) do an RSVP on the meetup event for me. I hoped that meetup.com had an API but puppeteer is always a great alternative.

I first looked at Zapier for a meetup integration that can do this for me. While Zapier has a meetup integration, it doesn’t allow you to rsvp to a meetup event.

Then, I wrote my own thing and open sourced FootyBot(I called it “FootyBot” but this can be turned into something bigger with more integrations, I have had some ideas around this in social media space).

I also experiment a lot with my “Surprise”/“Lateral Thinking processes (they deserve a separate post). Under these processes, on the cleaning front, I got myself a “Roborock S50” for helping me with home cleaning. Happy so far!

Robot Looking Into Screen

I believe that we are still in the early days of home automation robots and a lot would improve in this domain and I am happy to be at the front of this experience.

I do a lot of automation and just pointed out two things that I did recently.

I am very excited to learn the latest development in this domain (self-driving cars, cooking robots, warehouse automation) and happy to be a part of it myself (both as a user and a creator).

What are your “automation” experiences? I would love to learn from you.