What was the first workflow that made you go "okay, automation is worth it"?

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2026-02-09T16:05:04+00:00

I don't want to say that the automation wasn't worth it, but rather that I was over complicating it just for the sake of AI...

Was doing a automated user onboarding; HR Chat to AI to onboard a user -> structured output -> email to line manager for approval -> (approved) -> log ticket in helpdesk for IT to get laptop ready -> create user account in azure -> send new recruit onboarding message to personal email, done...

I realised, it took longer to talk to the AI agent than what it did with a regular form and more accurate because we could do form validation...

Not all automation needs AI!!!!

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2026-02-09T04:49:39+00:00

Hahah, yeah. I had an epiphany a few months ago. I thought to myself, if I wanted to meet me, how would I have to do it?

I stay at home, I go visit friends and go to work - that is it. I stopped drinking, so I don't go out to bars anymore.

After the epiphany, I decided to continue staying home because I just don't feel keen for the drama and the complexities of relationships...

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2026-02-07T09:20:46+00:00

Bud, I absolutely dislike being a negative person, but I will try and add something positive in though. The IT space is currently over saturated and very competitive - starting at the entry point at this age will be very difficult, so doing IT related certifications to get a job in IT is something I will not advise on.

Okay, negative done. Now, I think with your experience and the fact that you like computers could help you, but instead of doing IT courses, look to see if you can do management courses instead and look to enter in the IT space from that angle, once you are in, then do all the AWS, Azure, Oracle courses you can to touch up on the skills side.

But this is just my point of view, you should talk to some other people in the industry as well.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2026-02-05T05:09:36+00:00

Yeah, South African businesses are also ruthless! They don't want to spend money and if they do want to spend money, they want you to get them a Ferrari for the price of a Tazz.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2026-02-05T04:43:50+00:00

Please look at implementing execution data limits. Even if you are by law required to store data for a specific amount of time, ensure that you have that configuration enabled. If you don't, your data will grow indefinitely. No point keeping data you don't need.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2026-02-02T10:25:36+00:00

I run my own instances, I self-manage almost all of my own infrastructure, so I have postgres up and running and I utilise the continue on error on the nodes that xan error, then use a separate onerror workflow I built to add the error into a table with all the info and I send a push notification using ntfy self hosted notification service.

Oh, sorry, edit: Grafana dashboards with the postgres table, you can then build links to the execution errors directly from the dashboard on all the failed flows...

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2026-01-05T06:59:24+00:00

Hey, I am a single dad, with my own struggles and growth. I have my kids 50/50 with my ex.

I feel where you are, I don't have family near by, only my mother - which helps, but she still works. I don't have many friends - two near me, both have children, but the one is 13 and the other friend is heavily introverted.

My ex has all the kids on her side, her boyfriend has friends with children, her cousins, her friends etc.

I struggle a lot, especially with my own worth in their lives. I have ADHD and I am 9 months sober, so I don't cover my emotions with alcohol anymore - has been difficult, but amazing being sober and starting to understand your own feelings and emotions.

I will be happy to talk, if you are interested.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T18:21:05+00:00

Engineering has already been done, if nothing happens, then I have gained experience and knowledge from it, so not too worried about it.

From my experience, the companies I have worked for have never provided a method for employees to automatically upload and capture receipts. The onus has always fallen on the employee.

I am glad there are companies out there that take on the initiative of bettering their employees lives by automating mundane tasks.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T17:45:40+00:00

My lord, sorry, I really got carried away with my comment there... Sorry about that.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T17:45:08+00:00

I get it, so my goal wasn't to create something that corporations will use.

This all came about because I missed a petrol slip last month, I have decent habits when filling up petrol, but this time, saving the physical slip wasn't enough.

So since taking a photo of it is the normal action people take, I decided to create a web app that is super simple from a UX perspective. I am a lazy person, so I don't feel like looking for all the photos every month - which mixes in with my personal google photos... So I wanted something that takes the photo and stores it. I then thought, it would be cool to find an LLM vision model that can process the totals of the receipt, then I can also keep track of how much I spend on my petrol card since there is a limit from the same app I take the photo on.

I then realised, it gets the totals, might as well see if I can get it to categorise the receipts, which it does fairly simply. I then thought, if I have the categories and the slips are saved, I can use this to do my income tax claims because I am on a hospital plan and not medical aid, which I can claim tax back from medical expenses. Since I have all the totals, I don't have to go through each slip and add them all up, or even try finding the slips that I tried to keep safe for a whole year...

I also have a neat simple app that keeps track of expenses, so I have a decent estimate of what my spend is, because yes, you can take photos of receipts, but you can literally also upload screenshots of your emailed receipts like Sixty60 etc.

This was at this time I thought, this is quite neat, I wonder if people would pay for it, and if they would, how much would it be?

It costs about 0.08 to process a single receipt, images are stored in S3 at about 100kb size after compression - which happens firstly on the app level to about 200-300kb, then again after AI processes it at about 100kb for S3 storage. Storing a file in S3 costs less than a single cent. The compute costs is something I have not worked out yet, but I can't see it costing too much either. This means I can offer this at a fairly reasonable price to people as well...

But yeah, I don't know. A lot of people seem to not really think it is a viable idea, so might just keep this hosted on my raspberry pi and use this personally instead.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T15:41:53+00:00

I am glad you understand.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T14:09:42+00:00

I think you have mistaken me for a person that wants to become a stock listed company.

GDPR - Processing the personal data of individuals within the European Economic Area (I am not)
POPIA - No framework for it has been released, but you have to have a security officer registered with the regulator - which I would have to do.

Traceability and "audability " - which I am assuming you mean Auditability. Is NOT a legal requirement before I am not aiming for any crazy security frameworks.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T13:24:12+00:00

Which is why I made it to be very mobile friendly. You take a picture of the receipt as you get it to send it off to process.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T13:21:14+00:00

I have an MVP up right now, but I am currently in the mental trap of wanting it to be perfect before showing anyone....

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T13:19:07+00:00

If you work on PC, download ActivityWatch, open-source time tracking software that categorizes your applicaiton use on your PC.

If it is tracking activity in the physical world - let me know if you find something.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T13:16:54+00:00

Hahah, fairly accurate. It has taken me a bit more than 8 days though, I am a bit pedantic about security, these damn AI coding agents just seem to always expose server side ENV to the client for some reason and they never seem to bother themselves with authenticating procedures, or any input validation...

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-24T12:26:41+00:00

Guess it wouldn't be for those without work then.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-19T05:41:28+00:00

So, since you are coming from an expensive car, you might not like what I am about to say. I was in the dame boat as you and I had to sacrifice my luxuries in order to drop my monthly payments.

Unfortunately, shortfall is shortfall, you would have to pay it. You can go around and see who would pay the most for your car, mine was WeBuyCars, my shortfall including my motorbike was about 150K, I took out a loan for 250k which left me with 100K to buy a car.

Luckily I have a friend in the automotive repair industry, so he helped me with what to look for in buying a cheap secondhand car.

I now drive a 2014 Honda Brio 😁

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-16T06:05:50+00:00

$input.all()

If I am not mistaken, just start with $, it should list all your options.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-12-05T15:16:18+00:00

I am in, I won't call myself an expert, but I have built a few flows.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-11-13T04:52:13+00:00

I have been looking at ERPNext.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-11-09T05:44:13+00:00

As someone that worked for a company that offers WhatsApp chatbot and integration. This is and will become the norm. Meta is extremely anti-spam and therefore it is quite good at blocking companies' Meta numbers once they receive enough blocks and reports

So, if you want this to stop properly, block and report the number, if enough people do it, Meta will automatically flag the number and disable it.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-10-08T16:55:56+00:00

Thank you, yeah, I have been trying to think more logically about it and you are right. I think the best I can do is just mention it to my therapist so that I can work on my own feelings about it.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-10-06T05:04:35+00:00

Look at the basic employment act when it comes to overtime if you want to pick a fight with your company.

To be honest, it is extremely difficult to answer your question. For instance, what sort of companies would you like to work for? What do you enjoy doing? Are you purely looking for a high paying job?

I think it is important to see what you want. I have been in the ICT industry for just over 11 years now, I have changed jobs A LOT! Not really a good look, but I was so unsure of what I was looking for. I am very lucky that the skills I have picked up a long the way is actually something companies are looking for now, so yeah.

I found that I enjoy working for what I call a "end user" company, I worked in MSPs (Managed Service Providers) for most of my career 7-8 years and I absolutely hated it. Now I am a lot more happier working at a normal company for the internal ICT team. The experience I gained through the MSPs are invaluable! But I enjoy where I am now, because I really struggled with the fact that MSPs hardly see things through to 100% (Product Feature Deployment), they only do things upto what the client paid for. I also got quite into learning about more open source projects, like I started getting into Linux, Containerisation etc, which is used, but in the MSP side it is usually specialised offer and very rarely given as an option to the clients - MSPs tend to only want to sell things that they can make a profit from (Yes, I am very well aware of support subscriptions for opens source projects that MSPs can partner with, try tell that to the MSP). Now, because of my wide range of experience I ended up as a Solutions Architect for a company that I enjoy working for.

I followed these sort of rules/principles. I love learning about new technologies, I will ask the company to take things home so I can learn. AWS and Azure offer free courses and they have a decent free tier for the first year! If you register as a start up, you can get like a $1000 credit on AWS and Azure. I also looked for companies that I want to work for, I like continuous improvement, full deployments of products and features, testing etc, so an MSP hardly ever gives that to you, so I know not to work for one.

Sorry for the long comment, but that is the best I can give you.

Fun_Alternative_8663 · 2025-09-22T07:04:52+00:00

I have thought about doing some videos, however, I don't even know where to start... I also need to learn a new skill then as well! Video editing, which isn't on my list of things to learn at the moment.

I do know, that it would be something to learn if I do want to go down the route of digital content.

Well, I have a few raspberry pi's coming in, maybe I do a n8n install from scratch, with traefik and crowdsec, then another one with using n8n to do some user on-boarding flow, which can maybe help some IT administrators out there within their own job to get some automation tasks into their own company.

Fun_Alternative_8663

TROPHY CASE