Fragile Automation Systems
I have a set of early morning aggregation automations I run and in the last few months I’ve run into oddities with regular automated syndication of data streams. I have quite a few things that push to a Slack channel, but it something keeps changing with Slack and it isn’t capturing anything. Much of it seems to be on the Slack end of things where inbound connections route to a Slack bot and not to the hardwired channel in the instance.
Slack used to be the stable and solid endpoint for tracking data, but something has changed.
I have a few different services that have triggers for automating capturing, copying, and writing data in another service where I can more easily make use of it through pushing it to a calendar, spreadsheet, central messaging (where I control when I pay attention to it), and moving it into a format for review or to work with on some calm cadence. Slack is one of the calm endpoints, and sometimes midpoint where I pull certain things in the last day or two from Slack to be in full view with other related items working around.
My keyboard shortcut app of choice for more than a decade has been hitting odd security lockouts that keep it from working. The lockouts are from other apps or services and they lock it from working across the device. I have around 15 to 20 shortcuts I use regularly to insert templates, drop in URLs, add dates, and more. But, when it gets locked I type the three or four keystrokes and nothing happens. It is like being in a dreamworld and a door won’t open. After an hour or few the lock goes away and it works. I’ve contacted the vendor and they are trying to sort out what is now causing this.
When then the automations and silent systems break or an interface is empty, but should have quite a few things in it and there are only a few, it is a little disconcerting. Fragile services aren’t new, but many solid services for years are now increasingly fragile and that trend needs to reverse.