Writing a personal automation API
Although a fun activity, do not set high expectations out of personal automation. I think the quoted XKCD [1] (also [2]) strip illustrates the glory and peril of personal automation enough.<p>Automation makes most sense in the true context where it belongs, &quot;business.&quot; Automating a complicated e-mail marketing process with targeting, statistics and all makes sense because you need tens of thousands of instances of that process to be executed to create business value.<p>Except for rare idiosyncratic use cases, spending time in personal automation is more of a hobbyist and educational activity. Further, if the use case is not &quot;that&quot; rare, there is almost always &quot;an app for that&quot; anyway. Therefore, have no high expectations out of that.<p>With that disclaimer in mind, if you are into it, check out the open-source project Huginn [3] that can &quot;Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf.&quot; for personal automation. Lastly, the industry standard of cloud API integration currently might be Zapier [4], which has more integrations, (business) battle-tested features compared to end-user oriented IFTTT.<p>----<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1319&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1319&#x2F;</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1205&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1205&#x2F;</a><p>3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;huginn&#x2F;huginn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;huginn&#x2F;huginn</a><p>4: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zapier.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zapier.com</a>