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Welcome to AutomationTown! A podcast about regular people, building automations for the problems we all share.
First time here? Start with S02E01 "For When You Need A Chatbot"
What are the things you do each day that you'd rather forget?
Chad & Jason explore common pain points for knowledge workers, and track down the people & tools necessary to automate trivial to-do's.
Previously on AutomationTown, so you know Amelia. Hi guys. So excited to work with you. You mean badass kicking down doors, suspiciously knowledgeable about cellular equipment for a sound engineer. Amelia
Doors open. That's the one. She's kind of amazing. Oh. Hi, uncle Buzz Amelia. What's up? Rumor has it, you've still been kicking around with the automation show Boys, if you haven't figured this out yet, those guys are bad news. They nearly got you killed in the Grow Center collapse, and I don't wanna know what they have planned next.
It was you who stake at the time. That's right. I put you in that role. Now, let's not forget how you ended up there. Now have I made myself. Yes. Thank you. Alex. Something's wrong. The old ways are better. Is it the potato zone? It could be. Why don't you call an ambulance? Uh, I'll get 'em laid up over on the couch here.
Come on, chap, your friend takes an anti-anxiety medication called potato zone. He was prescribed a 20 milligram dose, but what's in his system right now? More. Mayor Davis and I were just discussing the new joint water initiative Water initiative, which ends tomorrow. You don't think that's the control room in the subway tunnels.
Welcome radio. Shit. Oh, hey Paul. Start. What's all this? This picture. Oh, buzz. Who is this? That's my manager. Your manager is Buzz Mc Tompkins. Yeah. He owns Radio Shack. He isn't here too much. Buzz owns the Radio Shack. Hey you. You can't go back there. Yes, we can see you later, sir. Hey, that's four important, okay.
Down the hatch. Nice. Down the hatch.
Oh, we are audio.
Hello? Come back to me. Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Jason?
Okay. What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? All of them. All of them. Everyone in the Capitol building is like that. Ew. Yeah. He's there. He's not there. Mayor Davis, I recommend we declare a state of emergency and get back to the Capitol building immediately. Okay, let's go.
Oh wait. What is declaring an emergency? Do an emergency broadcast will go out, mayor. Where in hurry, I'm giving her all. She's got an emergency broadcast, goes out telling people to stay in their homes, stay in their homes. Is that what people should be doing? Look, they're just cars everywhere. What a mess.
But they all pulled over and turned on their hazard lights. Like a very polite zombie movie from the Capitol building will be able to access any critical infrastructure. If your hypothesis about the manual bird pipeline is true, can we deactivate from the capital? I'm not. But I know we can't from your rv.
Ah, the rv. That's why we haven't been affected. We've been in this since the pipeline went live. We've been drinking the RV water. I have not been drinking RV water. Well, you are drinking bottled water, but that explains why you and I are fine, but everyone else isn't. Hey, I need to call Paul.
Come on Paul. Come on Paul. Come on Paul.
Hey, it's Paul. Can't come to the phone right now. Uh, leave a message. Hey, Paul, when you get this call me. Something's gone completely wrong. There's something in the water supply. Don't drink the tap water. Just drink bottled water. Oh, I hope you get this in time. Hey, I'm with Kat. We're heading up to the capitol.
Call me when you get this message.
Hold me, Davis. Is this the end? It all just hit the fan in Automation Town, Jake Mccr. Barry's got something into the water supply and. Well, brains. Brains. We've got a zombie movie on our hands and here it comes. Integrations. Integrations. What do you do when you have an app that just doesn't integrate work around back doors?
Hacks, hack those integrations on this. The season finale of Automation Town.
Four hours ago. Oh, sorry. I thought you were No, all good. We're just wrapping up. I am so briefed. Chad, there's, it really just scratched the surface, but I guess that's good for today. Kat was just telling me about some legacy systems. We need to figure out how to integrate with some of the new stuff we're bringing online.
Oh, juicy. Yeah. I told her she needed to tune into the show. Do you listen to your podcast? I do not listen to your podcast, right? Well, Davis, how do you handle, I don't know, automateable Systems? Well, you first sit down and then you cry a little bit. Okay? And then you cry some more. Oh, and then you realize, I think they're talking more about like, how do you automate it, Chad?
I think that's what they're looking for. Potato Zone. Where are you? Automateable systems tend to be desktop. Or they're just really old and the developer's gone home and they're not building for like the new way of, of the way that the world kind of works now. And I think you find yourself in these situations more, more than you think, where you know something's working.
Somebody put a whole bunch of money into a system and like it does one or two or five things really, really well and it helps make them money. But it just doesn't work for data analysis or accountants or lawyers or risk people, and like they just have to deal with it. So when it comes to, you know, I, I kind of laugh about the crying piece, but like, is it worth changing?
and that that whole psychology of is it worth, it really pops into your mind when you start going down these rabbit holes and typically it's not. So working through these workarounds is, is why so much of us, of the work that we've done over the last couple decades has been just moving data between one place or another.
So, you know, I cry a little bit, recognize whether or not you should keep it or if it's worth changing, and then go from there. It's fascinating to me. We've gotten to such scale. Modernish computer systems are, I feel like are like the SAPs of the world, are getting really, really old, really archaic for the first time, but they're so big.
They're on a scale where it's actually like virtually impossible to change some of these systems. So we have this entire new category of tech that is. What can I just bolt on to an existing system? Because if it's just way too much inertia to move from A to B, then like, no, this workaround, I guess it will kind of sort of get you there.
I would add one other scenario where you run into things that are hard to automate and it's in context where you've got platform lock-in. So maybe they've just made the intentional decision not to make it easy to automate or I. because they've got solutions for everything that they think you ought to be able to do, and they just want you to like pull in the full suite, right?
They want you to buy another module. So this category tech, let's talk through some of these sort of bolt-on things to consider with your old timey system. First thing I think of is rpa, robotic process automation. That's hot right now. It's still hot and it's just like, it's the Band-Aid and duct tape of automation solutions and sometimes it works really well and you're like surprised
It's like that tech that you're like, wait, I just bolted on 17 things where I had to tell it which field to click into and wait 10 seconds and it actually worked. It. I wonder how long that tech is going to be around and, and useful, and I, and I'm afraid that it's gonna be for a really long time because of these problems.
It's like taking a picture of your monitor, , like you're gonna have a picture of whatever's on your monitor, but you're not gonna be proud of it. No, . So rpa, just from a high level RPA fundamentally is like desktop. Bots that can look at all the same things you can look at on the monitor and click around and do all those things.
The problem is they're super fiddly. They're not the easiest things to make. And as soon as something on the screen isn't what it expects, it just doesn't have the intelligence to do what you need it to do. Oh boy. But when it works, it works well. Yeah. And when it does, you can save. So much time and so much effort.
It's one of these things where you're just, yeah, the fragility is sometimes worth the risk of putting it in, and that's why there's a whole category of consultants and companies and billion dollar companies that are offering this out to companies, because not everyone's going to be able to use APIs and to standard ways of communicating between apps.
So yeah, long live rpa, but at the end of the day, I love that monitor reference. It's really funny. Yeah, the, it seems like the super high volume use cases, it's really compelling for us. So if you've got an entire floor of people that are doing a thing, absolutely. Find a way to, you know, pull RPA in to help and it, like you bring up a good point about it's still being worthwhile when it's clunky.
I think oftentimes it's easy to, Get frustrated when you can only automate 80% of it, or if it breaks once a week. At the end of the day, like you've gotta consider breaking is okay as long as it's replaced manual work with automated work. So janky oftentimes is better than nothing at all. If it means it's taking a bunch of work off of your plate and yeah, it still breaks a lot and you gotta hop in and tinker with it.
Like you have to have a plan for that. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. What are some other, uh, technologies? Uh, I know we've got probably screen scraping is almost another version of rpa. Yep. But sometimes those live in your browsers. Sometimes they live in applications. They're great for gathering information off of, say, a website that you have to log into and even, you know, using screen scraping inside of RPA is a pretty popular use case.
Yeah. One thing we talked about a while back was services that will monitor websites. So like a website, you know, a landing page is not something through in a traditional sense that you would integrate with, but if you wanna be notified of this new spot at the RV park just became available. We touched on services.
Do that sort of thing. So yeah, web-based stuff, it's usually apps that are like monitoring the code of that webpage. I suspect especially like, you know, we're talking about stuff in Automation Town and just kinda the legacy government systems you have. Like you said, I think it's, it's generally gonna be desktop stuff and so how do we, how do we bolt helpful things on top of that?
You two need anything to drink? I'm good. I take a bottle of water.
Here you go. Chad, when we were looking at the traffic camera system, what was the app you were talking about migrating data to? I don't know, Airtable probably. Uh, so one way to think about difficult to automate systems. Starting with how to get that data into a system that can be automated. A database system like Airtable, use Google Sheets, that sort of thing.
Gil's been doing a lot with Google Sheets. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. So thinking about like RPA for example, you don't necessarily want to automate everything with rpa. You don't wanna send RPA out to all of your other apps to send that stuff to all these different places. Better application of RPAs, probably.
Like how do I get that data just to a system to start and then automate from that system? Right? Yeah. One of the prior episodes we talked about, you know, a manual process of downloading a CSV file is the start of the process, and then you want to automate it from there. Maybe it's the only way you can get data out.
Mm-hmm. using RPA to grab the stuff and then use a web hook to send the data over or some other method. A form, you know, that gets it into some type of modern system that you can then do whatever you want with. So great use case and probably less finicky and less likely to break the lower the number of steps are involved.
Right. So, and that's I think, kind of a trap with these sort of bolt-on ways of automating your desktop is well. Really the big draw of RPA is it works just like a human user, and so it's easier to understand what it's doing, but the fact that it can do everything that a human user can do. isn't a rationale for then, like having it do everything that you do because different types of automation have different levels of robustness.
You know, making an API call is going to be much more robust than logging into the website of Trello and navigating to the page where I want to put that thing, and then the bot putting that thing there. So yeah, the first step in considering how do. Kind of modernize this legacy system to do more of What I need is to think through just how can I use something like RPA to get it to a connected system where then I can use it with the tools that I'm familiar with that makes the zappier, all that stuff.
What you said about being familiar with is the key, like you don't have to know all of the connected systems out there. Hey, if you really love air, Go for it. If you really like Google Sheets, you could probably build everything around Google Sheets. If you really, really wanted it to, Hey, super Tech, super techy, and you want to go build on Bongo or Postgres or whatever you want, go for it.
Like you will change over time in the tools that you use. But the common starting point is just getting it into a modernized system and man, that is half, that is three quarters of a lift sometimes. Of making your life easier, so like getting real practical. The traffic data system, I know that's logging like incidents and so that probably means working out where in that application, what is the most seamless way to get that information out.
And there's probably a bunch of different ways to get it out. You can probably go through the UI and it scrapes all the things individually, but if there's like a data mining. You know, exporter or a CSV export, that's probably a more robust way to get that information consistently rather than navigating a bunch of pages.
So that's in my mind, kind of the first step. And then on, on the other side of that, the bot's gotta then park that somewhere helpful. And then from there, you're really just rolling with your usual cloud workflows. Yields been building out some financial data with Google Sheets, but if we can pull the ticketing data from the traffic camera system into Google Sheets, along with the ticket invoice data from QuickBooks, hmm, yeah.
We may be able to then automatically update the customer ticket portal based on the QuickBooks payment status. Let's see what Gil thinks. Uh,
Chad Gil, I'm here with Kat. Hi Gil. Ah, hello Kat. So Gil, we think we've worked on how to sync the ticketing data outta the traffic control system to Google Sheets. Okay. I like the sound of that, but now we need to pull the ticket data into Google sheets. Wow, that sounds like a job for live flow. I thought you might say that.
So live flow is my favorite way to send quick, quick data out to Google. Super quick and easy to do. Sync full reports from QuickBooks to Google Sheets or use live flow's templates. Let me pull up their reports. I like the QuickBooks invoices and receive payments report For this, it's going to list out all of our customer payments, in this case payments for traffic tickets, beauty, so live flow will Autosync payments over to Google Sheets and the real upside then is you have the power of everything else Google Sheets will do.
Okay, so I'm understanding you're gonna sync ticketing data and two. From your traffic system. Then use live flow to sync ticket payment data into Google Sheets from QuickBooks. Yep. Then just do a look up on those tickets to see if there are any matching payments. Now that we've got all that data in Google Sheets, we can really sync it anywhere.
Our ticketing portal will anywhere that info needs to go, wow, this is gonna save a ton of time. Yep. Agreed. Thanks Gil. Automation call. Woo. So, legacy systems, you've got, you know, an RPA bot or some sort of connector to then pull it into your modernized system. Not everything's gonna be suited for every size data set, I guess.
What are the D. Ways you may connect that to a cloud-based system? Oh, I guess you could, you know, use a system that is almost like its own api. So there's, there's a couple out there. Uh, I think there's a. , a pretty powerful one called XO that a lot of people are using and what that can do, it almost acts as like your own backend for your app.
So less spreadsheety, but more, Hey, this is a database, this is a server, this is, you know, an API that you can call and do your own stuff with. Just like you would call into Airtable or you would call into, you know, your email or things like that. These sort of really powerful backend systems that are just completely different than what Google Sheets would be are like all the rage right now with those like pro no coders and low coders and even, you know, developers that want to like not overcomplicate things.
So it's really cool to see some of these apps come out like this and investors are all over it too. Lots of lots of investment into systems like this and. I think it's just upping the game on the back end of a lot of the, the systems. It can kind of become a gateway drug, you know, if you start moving some of that data over and then if you end up pushing up against the limits of an air table or something like that.
Mm-hmm. , uh, that was XOs X ano, right? Mm-hmm. X ano.com. That's right. I've been seeing, I feel like I've been seeing that while bar boy's, he getting sleeping here. Ooh.
Hello. They did what?
Okay. And they're just Okay. Yeah, probably call an ambulance. Okay. Be there in a few everything. All right. I'm not sure. A couple people on the team are, yeah, something's wrong. I'm going to run over to the. You don't think I know. I know. We'll let you know what I learned.
Wanna see the new Pat upgrade upgraded Pat at your service? Pat, check everyone's calendar and then schedule our next automation pod recording session please. Sure. Should I include Paul and Amelia? Yeah, include them both because I can perform all of the functions necessary to manage a recording session.
I know, I know, I know. We aren't quite ready to cut that cord yet. All participants are available tomorrow at 11:30 AM Let's do it after lunch at 1:00 PM I'm unable to confirm your availability through gov. Cal. Uh, the town runs on this kind of old timey government calendar system. The same one we use for email.
Yep. And as you might imagine, it doesn't offer anything in the way of integrations, so isn't it just drive you nuts when you find this tool that someone's using and it just works really well for them, but, There's no integrations whatsoever. So we've talked about this before where, okay, how much data needs to be done?
Are we using things like rpa? But I think like the real lift here is to find ways to get access to this data that you may not know about. And a lot of people will get discouraged if they go to a website and it's just there's nothing with integrations or they open up zap. Or make, or any of the other middleware tools, they search for their tool.
There's nothing there. So like, okay, what else can I try? And they're maybe on like a partnership website or a Google search. You're like, oh. Do they have an api? You're like, oh, of course they don't, but they might, and it's only open to certain people. You're like, okay, so by process of elimination, there's some people that can get access to this app, but some people can't.
And we're obviously in the, some people can't category. So there's this whole notion of piggybacking off of other people that have paid to get access to this tool and using them as this intermediary. And actually that's probably what we can do for gov cal, right? So Pat, gimme a list of all the programs gov.
Cal integrates with gov. Cal integrates with frontline help desk, unify centralized municipality software. And Polti Meat. Okay. What does the frontline integration look like? Gov Cow Email sync seamlessly. With Frontline. Pull all your Gov Call emails into a modern Help desk interface. Oh, I just need a calendar integration.
That really doesn't help. How about Unify? No calendar integration from Unify Pull It. Tomy does offer a calendar integration. Oh yes. A two-way sync with Gov Cal is pese supported by the API connectors we use. Polti Meat works with Zavier Make and has an open api. Bingo. Bingo. Pat. Spin up a trial account of ESE connected with Golf Cal to get the calendar syncing, then create a Zap using the Poleto meat Zappier trigger for new calendar events and add them to my calendar.
Got it. I let you know if I need any help with that. Well, that's disgusting, but effectively we've got gov Cal Bridge to Zap here. Now thanks to that native poly meat. Jason. Oh, Jason, Jason. Jason. Hello. Hear me? Jason, can you hear me? Jason, what are I gonna do? All of them. All of them. Everyone in the Capitol building is like that.
Ew. Yeah. Is he drooling? He's there. He's not there. Mayor Davis, I recommend we declare a state of emergency and get back to the Capitol building immediately. Okay, let's go.
Uh, wait. What is declaring an emergency? Do an emergency broadcast will go out more Davis. Where? In hurry. I'm giving her all. She's got an emergency broadcast. Goes out telling people to stay in their homes. Stay in their homes. Is that what people should be doing? Look, they're just cars every. What a mess, but they all pulled over and turned on their hazard lights, like a very polite zombie movie.
From the Capitol building, we'll be able to access any critical infrastructure. If your hypothesis about the manual bird pipeline is true. Can we deactivate from the capitol? I'm not sure. But I know we can't from your rv. Ah, the rv. That's why we haven't been affected. We've been in this since the pipeline went live.
We've been drinking the RV water. I have not been drinking RV water. Well, it you are drinking bottled water. But that explains why you and I are fine, but everyone else isn't. Hey, I need to call Paul.
Come on Paul. Come on Paul. Come on Paul. Hey, it's Paul. Can't come on the phone right now. Uh, leave a message. Hey, Paul, when you get this call me. Something's gone completely wrong. There's something in the water supply. Don't drink the tap water. Just drink bottled water. Oh, I hope you get this in time. Hey, I'm with Kat.
We're heading up to the Capitol. Call me when you get this message.
The door is locked again. Ugh. Someone must have been in like a crawl room since we were last here. Huh? That never gets old.
Okay. This is definitely different. Yeah. I feel like these computers were all off the Ford. I don't know that I've messed with that. Wait, hang on. I just got a voicemail from Chad. From Chad. Yeah. I'm Must have pick up a 3G receiver. Put it on speaker. Oh, I can't hear anything. Let's go ahead to the tunnel.
Hey, Paul, when you get this, call me. Something's gone completely wrong. There's something in the water supply. Don't drink the tap water. Just drink bottled water. Oh my gosh. Oh, I hope you get this in time. Hey, I'm with Kat. We're heading up to the capitol. Call me when you get this message. Okay. Let's call Chad back.
Paul. Chad, where are you? We made it to the control room. There's a bunch of computers. Need to listen. It's the water. We have to stop. Chad Water. Chad, stop the pipeline. Chad. Don't drink the water. It's up. Get back to the capitol. The pipeline is creating the problem. We were right. Chad. Ugh. Okay. I I think he said, he said, don't drink the water.
Stop the water and get to the capitol. We've got water bottles. Those should be fine. I filled them this morning. Let's figure out how to shut all this down. Let's go kick some stuff. Let's kick some stuff.
Oh, what?
Davis Davis. That's a weird nap. Why does my mouth taste like blueberries and batteries? Ugh.
Jason, uh, Chad where what's happening and where did you go? Um, so it's hard to explain. Okay. You're in the rv parked outside the Capitol. I'm in my office in the. Head outside, go through the double doors, and then head up the first stairwell on the right. You'll see my office at the top of the stairs. I'll meet you there.
Okay, so we can't turn off the pipeline. Not from here. Anyway, I reached out to the team in Manuel Burke we've been in communication with, but it's late. I can't get anyone, so our water supply is being contaminated and we don't even have a way to turn it off. Not unless your friends come through for us, that is.
Oh, score. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop. Stop. What? It's a drinking fountain. We'll explain. You know, Jake's water initiative, worst case scenario happened. It's what we feared. It would seem that something's gotten into the water supply, potato zone, potato zone. Remember I was trying for over a week to get my hands on it.
There was that shortage. What do you think? I mean, I would characterize how I feel like a. Would you mind explaining that one to me? It's a medication that makes you feel like, blah, in low doses. It's used to treat anxiety, but in higher doses it just makes you completely indifferent. Unmotivated. Well, have you heard from Paul and Amelia yet?
Yeah, they found the control center. I told them they needed to find a way to shut it down, though we don't have a way to shut it. Not from our end. We've been communicating with a team from Manuel Bur that controls it. I don't think anybody could have quite expected this.
Well, everybody downstairs seems to have come to, I'm going to make sure everyone gets home safe unless there's anything else you need from me. No, that'd be great. Good night. Good. Goodnight. So the tap water, we've got a repeating message going out on the emergency broadcast system. Hopefully everyone gets the word and Paul and Amelia are able to come through.
It's just all this started with the break-in at the grumbling center. How do you figure? Well, our theory at the time was they broke in to get access to the subway tunnels and the control room, and that was just a few days before the grimley collapse. Last night I was racking my brain just thinking about how Jake's crew got down there, who's behind this?
Paul had that air table base tracking the Ley Center door. That was how we knew someone had gotten down there before the collapse. Yeah. The motion sensor that was that we like showed 'em how to take if F T C T and log that stuff in air table and we could see the night of the break-in, they'd tripped that sensor on the Grimley Center door.
Look at this though. I've got access to the base and after the night of the break-in. That door sensor has triggered around 2:00 AM virtually every night leading up to the collapse. Like they kept going down there every night.
Cat mentioned traffic cameras. Yeah, we, we've got a system that logs all of that for ticketing and there's a. What was a rolling recording? The traffic cameras. There's an intersection just outside the Grimley Center. Okay. What was that system called? Traffic uh. Traffic log. Traffic log. Okay. Query by.
What's the date of the first break in again? First break in was October 6th. October 6th, the day Paul got fired. October 6th, 2:07 AM Look at this black suv. Look at that. A bunch of spooky. They break down your door and then they go, wow, okay. It was also triggered the night of the seventh, 1:52 AM Same suv.
Door opens. Look, they head in. Let me pull up the next night, the eighth night before the collapse u v. They're knocking. They're not, they're knocking on the door. The door opens from the inside. Hang on, hang on. There was someone there when the door. Do you see that? Play that again. Okay. So right after the second guy knocks, can you step through that?
A frame at a time? Okay. Second knock door starts opening. Zoom in on this. Yep. And someone steps out. No, no, no, no. Let me play that back. Hurry up. I can't. Can you turn it up? Hurry up. Move it. Hurry up. Move it. Hurry up. Yes. Move it. Amelia,
we're back. Hey guys.
Children waiting for the day. They feel good. Happy Birthday. Happy birthday. This has been season three of Automation Town. Automation Town is written and produced by Jason Staats and Chad Davis and edited by Paul O’Mara.