A Major Opportunity for Automation

Given the nature of my current employer – a monthly clinical magazine – many of the tasks assigned one month will be assigned again the next. Being on a 30-day cycle, I began to see patterns and repetitive tasks. I saw this as a perfect opportunity to build automation software that could completely change our workflow as a company.

So that’s exactly what I did. I have been building automation software everyday since, using React, Node, Express, and MongoDB.

A Few Projects I Can Share

Unfortunately not all of my projects can be shared for various reasons, but these are a few small examples to give an idea of what I do.

Webinar Email Generator

One of my major tasks when first hired was to code all the HTML emails that promote our online webinars. These emails all had different templates depending on their associated publication. I created a tool that not only sped up my production time, but allowed someone without HTML and CSS coding experience to generate the email.

Today, creating webinar emails are no longer a that task I do. Generating webinar emails has become as simple as filling out a form. Because of my software, I’ve made this task accessible and easy to do for someone else with no need for coding!

This project is live online: http://aegispublications.com/webinar-email-generator/
The source code: https://github.com/kevincauto/simple-email-generator

Taking an Idea to the Next Level – Newsletter Email Generator

Based on the success of the Webinar Email Generator, I decided to take the same approach to our publication email newsletters. Each month my company promotes our monthly issue, highlighting most of the articles. Additionally, emails focused around particular topics and specialties will be sent throughout the month.

The challenge here was that newsletters are much more complex. I needed to break down each email template into modular sections to allow for more flexibility. I wanted users to be able to add sections, delete sections, and drag and drop sections to swap positions. I was able to successfully accomplish this.

This project can be viewed here: http://aegispublications.com/email-generator/
The source code: https://github.com/kevincauto/email-generator

Content Formatter

I’ve created a text parsing software that allows us to convert InDesign article files to HTML-ready articles equipped will all the proper CSS classes and tags.

Data-Entry Bot

I created a data-entry bot that enters 216 articles into our backend content management system. The bot uses Electron (a headless browser) and a Node script to enter data, click check boxes, assign date ranges, and save data. This has been my most impressive software (in terms of saving time) to date. A task that would take all week has been reduced down to under 2 hours.