Slack & Pipedream Automation

Yesterday I stumbled upon a post on HackerNews where they were discussing automation. As I’ve read the post while at work I don’t have a link to it currently.

Besides some basic automation via IFTTT, Tasker and Apple Shortcuts one other product stood out: Pipedream.

It has a bazillion of integrations and more importantly, it lets you wire them up via NodeJS.

Also one of the replies on HN let through that many people are using Slack as their single point of notifications for all their notifications. An interesting thought.

Slack was built with teams in mind, but it also has a large set of integrations. So I thought I should give it a try.

I wrote about my “Life Statistics” Project before (here and here), so I thought I could use a pipedream-slack integration to add entries to my driving log on the fly.

So I created a pipedream and a slack account and started to mess with things. About an hour later I had working automation up.

Basically I created one slack channel for my driving log with an outgoing webhook to pipedream. At pipedream, I’m parsing the sent text and write to my database.

Now I can add a new trip with ease from my smartphone and I don’t need to keep a notebook in my glovebox where I have kept the driven kilometres.

According to xkcd it was worth the effort. We’ll see what I will be automating next.