How I saved hours with coding (and how you can too)!
You can save a lot of time! Life is full of repetitive, boring tasks that take up way too much time and make you think, “Wow, if only I had a bot to do this for me!” Well in the age of programming, it’s possible! Even for people with little to no experience! In this article, I will cover how people — from professionals to people with no prior knowledge — can automate crappy tasks nobody wants to do.
How I did it
This is just my story of how I saved a few hours using the programming language Python—you can safely skip this part. My requirement was simple: go to a website, input some information for a scenario (we had permission), get the output, and repeat the process for a few other scenarios.
The process looked like so:
As you can imagine, it was quite a lengthy process, and took about 10 minutes per iteration with an average of 3–4 iterations. All of this was done every day (except weekends of course) at variable times. Being the ultra awesome programmer I am (it took me months to realize), I decided this was a great time to bust out my coding skills and get the job done. It took a bit of debugging, which I will help you avoid, and a few weeks to research methods. To access the website and enter input, I used Selenium, a website testing tool, and smtplib, a Python module that can email data to me. I put all this together into a Python script, converted it into a windows batch file, and put it into windows task scheduler to run every day (except weekends of course) at 11:00 AM. After all this, here is how the process looked like:
How you can do it
First, find a task (preferably digital, unless you’re into robotics) that is pretty time consuming and doesn’t really require a lot of skill. Some examples include: logging into a website and getting some info, getting the news, or even filling out forms.
Next, you’re going to want to get the programming language to do this in. If you already have an IDE that can run Python, you can skip this step. Otherwise, you’re going to want to download Python which you can get a guide for here. Once you’ve done that, you need a place to write your code. If you’re not planning to dive deep into coding anytime soon, I recommend using Notepad or any other simple text editor.
Afterwards, you need a way to get the code. Here, if you want to test your luck and not really do any coding, you can just ask AI to generate the code for you, paste it into your notepad, and ask for the rest of the steps. For the those of you who either already know how to code, want to know how to code, or just understandably don’t trust AI, read on and learn my tips and tricks. If you don’t know how to code in Python, you can find a guide here, and if you want to learn more about Python and why we are using it you can go here.
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By now, the people who tried to use AI and failed miserably should be back to read the rest of the article (thanks for the second chance), and we can continue. Don’t get me wrong, using AI is a great tool for debugging and you can use it if you are having issues, but for more complex ones, you can email me at saigiridhar.chitturi@gmail.com.
Your automation toolbox
There are a few things to consider when choosing what modules to use, and this is something you can totally use AI for! For access and interacting with websites, Selenium is your best option; for using mouse and keyboard with the program, pyautogui and keyboard (the module) are great; and to access email, smtplib is a solid option. In the following list you can see more about these modules and more. Also, all the underlined words are links to places with more info.
Selenium
Selenium is actually a website testing software, but it can be used for other things as well. There are 2 routes you can go with this, manually inputting the html tags to interact with elements, or using some sort of action recorder extension like Katalon for chrome and Selenium IDE for Safari. Using these tools helped me a lot in the process and will likely save you a lot of time.
Pyautogui and the keyboard module
These are great tools if you want the program to move your mouse or type outside of a browser. You can use these to interact with elements that Selenium cannot, like forms outside of browsers or interact with JavaScript elements
Smtplib
This is a free module you can use to send emails to yourself or others, great for scheduling emails with info.
OpenAi’s API
This is a very powerful tool for automation but it can be quite complicated especially for beginners and costs money beyond the free trial. However, if you can use this, a lot more can be done with Python.
Other modules
There are always new modules coming out with new and amazing features which is why I implore you to go ahead and do some research of your own to find tools for your task
Conclusion
Well, you’ve made it to the end and you know what to do to start your automation journey. It won’t be an easy one, and you will definitely get frustrated at some point, but I can assure it is so worth it to see your program running smoothly and save you hours of time. If you have any questions, problems, or noticed something wrong, you can email me at saigiridhar.chitturi@gmail.com .
PS. If you’re interested on how neural networks work and want to build one of your own, check out my completely free guide here!
