I don’t know about you – but I really don’t like spending time doing small manual tasks that don’t add much value. Well, to be frank, even large manual tasks.
And really it is manual tasks that you have to repeat over and over. Kind of like busy work.
Maybe it is moving files around, deploying code to a large number of systems, adding users. Gathering data from the web, adding text to images, csv generation, product uploads to a website, posts to a website, content generation. Just to name a few
Some—probably most—of those tasks are, in fact, automatable.
There is an initial time investment upfront to create the automation – but for the tasks that get repeated over and over this can be a huge time saver.
Lets take an example of an automation I did, where I took a list of quotes and placed the quote text onto an image. There was 40,000 quotes. Yes, 40K. To do one by hand took – if you really fast and motivated about 10 minutes to do. 40,000 x 10 minutes = 400,000 minutes – or 277days. Working 24 hours a day.
We are not machines – let machines do the work.
You could throw more people at it.. But still. We have a highly boring repetitive task.
I designed a Python program and was able to take the 40K quotes, a pool of images, and generate roughly 2 quote images per second. So, in about 6 hours I had all the quote images generated.
From 277 days, to six hours. Not bad.
For kicks, I re-designed the system to take advantage of Rabbit MQ for message passing and message queuing. This allowed for adding nodes (minions) that would do the work, instead of having a single machine. This took the time from 6 hours, to 3 hours with a 2 minion system. Adding a third node, generating 40K quotes took 2 hours.
We could go on adding working nodes to this system and get the time lower, but there is a point of diminishing returns. 2 Hours to generate 40K quote images. Not bad.
Of course, now that you have the content. Next step was taking the image and quote and placing it on a website.
Again, this would be something that would take forever doing it by hand. 40K posts.
Planning ahead – when the quote images were generated they were assigned a unique id, that corresponded to the quote text that was used to generate the image. This gave an efficient way to take an image – lookup the text used to create it, take the text and image and apply those values to a template.
The generated template was saved (in groups) to a CSV file, with other useful information, like title, tags, category, to make importing the content into WordPress – very easy.
All that was left to do was import the content into WordPress – and Boom! Content….Content.. Content.
It comes down to this – if there is a repeatable task – in which you want the same result each time – automation is the way to go.
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I am Available for Freelance Projects
My skills are always primed and ready for new opportunities to be put to work, and I am ever on the lookout to connect with individuals who share a similar mindset.
If you’re intrigued and wish to collaborate, connect, or simply indulge in a stimulating conversation, don’t hesitate! Drop me an email and let’s begin our journey. I eagerly anticipate our interaction!