WFH has become the new normal for all of us and so are the daily stand-up meetings.

As standups happen at the same time on all working days, the need to find the zoom link every day and open it became a boring task for me. More than that, I also had to keep an eye on the clock so that I don't make my team wait.

Being a lazy guy, it didn't like doing this daily. I just wanted it to be automated once for all. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Cron Jobs 😎

Cron jobs are specifically designed to run a job at a particular time. For example, you can configure a job to run every hour or every 10th minute or every Tuesday and more.

Now that you know what cron jobs are, there's a software utility crontab available in Unix operating systems. It is the daemon that monitors the list of scheduled jobs and runs it at the specified time. Jobs can be configured by firing,

crontab -e 

The config is a one-liner with two values,

1. The time to run
2. An executable script that has to be run at that time.

Each line in this file represents a job and there can be n number of jobs.

The job that I had to do was straightforward. A simple script that can open the zoom app and join my standup meeting.
Here's the code for doing that.

#file_name: join_zoom_standup.sh
open 'zoommtg://us04web.zoom.us/join?action=join&confno=<conf_id>&pwd=<pwd>'

Make sure the script is executable.

chmod +x join_zoom_standup.sh

The only thing left is to configure the cron job to run from Monday to Friday at 10.30 am. (If you're not comfortable with cron expressions, head over here, a neat editor that helps you generate the expressions.)

Finally, this is the configuration for the same.

30 10 * * 1-5 ./custom_jobs/join_zoom_standup.sh

All set.

From now, you can just do your work and all of a sudden, the zoom app pops up, you hear people talking and realise it's time for the standup call.😉
This is worth spending 5 minutes. Isn't it!

You can view the list of scheduled jobs using crontab -l

Apart from this, there are a lot of tasks that you can force yourself to do just by automating it. I have done a few of them.

30 22 * * Wed ./custom_jobs/reading_list.sh
15 15 * * * ./custom_jobs/open_duo.sh
30 15 * * * ./custom_jobs/da_chore.sh
45 10 * * Fri ./custom_jobs/jira_board.sh
35 10 * * Mon ./custom_jobs/dev_scripts.sh

Quick info on what these are,

• Open my reading list from multiple places. Eg: twitter bookmarks page, onetab page, dev.to reading list page and more.
• Making sure that I have updated my JIRA board every Friday.
• Booting all applications that I work with, running all the dev scripts on Monday mornings. Eg: Starting dev servers, Starting Docker containers and more.

Being developers, we should always try automating the tasks that can be automated and focus on tasks that demand our focus.💪

** Happy Automating! **