Ansible, bash, python etc. stuff I can control, self host and move around at will. Even selfhosted gitlab ci makes me wary
Tired of getting held hostage by all these crappy SaaS that start of ok and then squeeze
Can you even imagine putting a price of $3000 per automation on a glorified IFTT? It doesn’t matter how much better it is.
Also a Zapier competitor but self-hosted
I just wish its main configuration/scripting language wasn’t JavaScript. If it was agnostic and I could drop-down to something else that would be great.
The Docker and packaged Apps they provide are excellent starting points.
For some reason I can never fully grok how data is moved around from node to node. (Or at least remember when I come back after many months)
(e.g.: items[0].json.data)
The problem I have with it, is just not enough integrations. That's really the secrete sauce behind zapier. They have _so many_ integrations with a million different services.
I do not see a way to automate most of my side projects given the free plan limitations and for an individual the pricing is a non-starter.
They were quite good at security operations. That probably made it easier to gain initial traction because they understand their target niche's problems.
I won't upvote this article because it's content marketing spam, but I respect the hustle and hope that it works for them!
I’ve tried them all.
I luckily no longer consult and now am an automation engineer for a company and I get to build things the way I want. So far a lot of Go and a little bit of Node and things are great. I'll take that any day over "We sell X, so you use X for everything."
That said, for home automation I do use Node Red and absolutely love it. The integration with Home Assistant is top notch and prototypes and tweaks take no time at all. It's much more like functional programming than a lot of low code tools and the function node allows for whatever JS you want. So if I need to do something complicated that would take a ton of individual nodes and spaghetti to work natively, I can just drop in some code and move on.
Tines is completely different - we don't rely on any prebuilt integrations - similar to postman, if you have a curl command then you can paste it into Tines, and the response is simply the json from the API you're hitting - makes it a million times easier to do exactly what you want. You can then use that response in the next action. If the API is terrible (it frequently is) we've a ton of templates to help get the relevant data, and a community with experience connecting to most tools.
Would love to talk about the challenges and see if anything we're doing (or could do) which would have made it easier? I hope you're in a better job now anyway!
It's all fine and dandy if you found a low-code solution that works for you, as long as you're comfortable paying a premium to pigeon hole yourself with that solution for the unforeseeable future, with no guarantees that you won't get royally screwed by some combination of planned obsolescence, feature deprecation, or the success of the company whose low-code product you are using.
Installing Node-RED is a low-effort task. Setting up backups of your flows is a tad more effort, but plenty of documentation around this. It also does IMAP, I believe. In an article bemoaning vendor abandonment syndrome, something free that runs on your own equipment, is a feature.
A post-it note would be a cheaper solution to that second problem.
In which case, I'd suggest learning how to write in a way that doesn't channel Dan Brown blog-shit (section header every two paragraphs vs. two-to-three pages a chapter). Or learn to write ad copy, or talk about using VAX systems to fill out the preamble to your chili recipe. Even failing that, I suppose you've reached your no-code solution out of ditch-digging.
As mandatum says above “The UX of Tines beats the pants off ALL of their competitors.” And we can talk about price.
Happy to answer any questions folks have too!
My interpretation of your pricing is that you're positioning it towards businesses that only have a small number automation targets, but those targets might have a high level of complexity & are repeated very often. At least that's the main market target that makes sense to me given the pricing model.
Not sure I understand the product positioning
- “Low code” is the current shiny thing
- These products are not sold to engineers, they’re sold to management types
- Management will only consider bringing in low code tools, because they believe this will save money on devs in the long run
- But that’s never how things play out, and engineers get involved anyway
So by making a “low code tool for engineers”, it seems they’re acknowledging the reality of the low code space and making sure the person who ultimately has to maintain this has the tools to make them successful while doing so…while also acknowledging the reality of selling integration/automation tools in 2022.
I could be way off here, but this is the only way that positioning makes much sense.
Activebatch is literally just install the scheduler on a Windows system, connect a SQL Server DB(use community edition) and then install the "execution agent" on whatever machine you want to run jobs on. In 10-15 mins you have a full automation environment.
From there, you have access to a decent GUI where you can drag, drop connect jobs together and mix and match different technologies, APIs, whatever because you can actually pass data and context from one step to another. They have a library of hundreds of "Job Steps" that range from simple stuff like copying files/FTP/SSH to things like calculating checksums to things like interacting with Twitter to send out tweets based on whatever condition you specify. There is just so much you can do and then they allow you to extend it with scripting/APIs etc.
Has anyone here used Activebatch? It is a hidden gem. Unfortunately it is an enterprise product so it is off limits to most people. Really wish someone made an open source alternative. :/
Here is a video but it does a pretty poor job explaining the capabilities of this software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Pw-Sisry0
I attended another meetup/training, Mulesoft was really pushing their web only visual workflow/mapping tool. And the instructor goes over the entire song and dance, and I said to him, that I was having real difficulty even understanding what type of problem this tool would be good for in a real-world situation. And he takes his glasses off and says to a room full of maybe 30 or 40 developers, that this tool they had been pushing so hard should NEVER be used in production, its only real use was for sale demos and maybe, maybe, doing some sort of POC which would need to be reproduced in 'code' at a later time. He used weasel words to say all of this of course, but his meaning was clear. This was 2018~2019, not the stone ages. So, I wasted that evening (there would be more) going to a sales enablement seminar billing itself a developer learning workshop.
No matter how many niceties you put on flow-based programming, the tools I had to use (all serverless) were the wrong ones for the job, and management was unreceptive to feedback (they wouldn't even give me a github repository).
I think Tines has potential but it's going to have to invest more into mitigating its shortcomings, not just further improvements on what it already does well. For example, as of March 2021, it was still far too easy to misclick and break something in production with no confirmation. You could export your setup as json, but IMO there was too much friction/manual work with that approach for it to be useful. To be fair, the company was pretty early stage at the time, maybe it's improved since then.
I don't blame Tines for what was the worst job I ever had (which I still have nightmares about to this day), but maybe someone else can be avoided the same fate with this feedback.
For example, do you really want to implement the entire Slack interactive callback workflow for displaying a simple dialog to a user? I guess not. I workflow will do a much better job at that sort of problems.
That being all said, I don't think tines does a particularly good job at this because it simply chains a number of HTTP requests. Some of these APIs require special care and HTTP simply does not cut it.
As an automation addict (and a no longer coding coder) this is what you should be using.
Prices range from free to cheap and I'm sure it does 99.9% of what "tines" does
I load the file into Excel and then use the Excel Filters feature to get pulldown menus for each column. I then review the columns and filter for ports, user-agents, IPs, etc. Pretty typical stuff.
Anyone know how to automate the above that would basically just spit out files based on how I’m manually doing the filters? Then I can just open a file that is grouped by user-agents or open a file grouped by ports.
Thanks.
The sales push felt very odd from that perspective, and the free tier of 3(!) is my non-starter.
I guess the thought is you can fire your developers and replace them with this. Ok I’m joking a little, but the sales pitch is probably that if you can hire one less developer, then it is worth it (I am skeptical, myself).
They’re not competing against other SaaS, they are competing against someone’s salary.
Here's some stuff I have set up:
Mac:
- I use several displays, and don't usually use the built-in monitor. I have an automation that dims it until it turns off.
- I have recurring KM script that deletes Yarn and NPM caches. They get huuuuge.
- I have a bash script that shows me the temperature of my Mac. I might be able to add an alert if the temp goes above x.
iOS:
- I hooked up my Pavlok shock bracelet to Reminders. I get a percentage chance of getting shocked every 15mins if tasks aren't done. The more tasks done, the less likely it is.
- Shortcut to pull up Youtube videos for PiP without a Youtube Premium account. You can find that online. Game changer.
- Sci-Hub and Meta.org search shortcuts made available in the share menu. You can get my Sci-Hub shortcut here (a good starting point for other search shortcuts): https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub-mirrors
- To help me debug shortcuts, I created a logger that writes to Data Jar or to a Note. Helps soo much. I haven't released it but you can get my Twitter at the link above if you're interested.
Node dev:
- Semantic commit template accessible through Dash's text-expander
- Next.js sucks but I made some scripts to automate that work. I had to use a Chrome-watcher that let's me refresh specific tabs from the command line.
There's many more. I wanted to share mine to maybe give you an idea of what tools to check out and what to automate to approximate your robotic luxury communist future.
That said, I never played with Yahoo Pipes. It looks like Alteryx I think?
I guess visually they look the same in that it’s flowchart building blocks
I'm sure there's a use case and a market for this product, but I'd wager that I'm not alone among the HN audience in thinking that I'd rather have a couple shell scripts in a Docker container on my own hardware or whatever than spend a bunch of money irreversibly trapping my automations in some proprietary cloud-hosted thing where they can be held ransom come the renewal date.
So yeah, I'll just leverage the skills I've leveraged over and over to make a living.
This seems to explain a skepticism that I have, with regards to new tools, new languages, and especially "a new [x] that will solve all your problems."
Also check out Zappa's scheduled tasks that have a similar goal and inspired our library. We used it initially as a backbone and ran into a series of issues that forced us to write our own version of it, but depending on your goals it could be enough.
