How we automate (a part of) our business
by Jake MangerCreating a data-serving subscription as a service (SaaS) means we need to crunch a lot of numbers. In our case at chainspy.net, this means summarising data, like number of transactions, volume and distribution of wealth on multiple blockchains like bitcoin every 10 minutes. This is so users of our service can see what people are using blockchains for and how they are performing usage-wise historically and in real-time.
We decided to use Celery to automate all of this for us. No, not the vegetable, but the Python (programming language) library. It lets us schedule these business-critical tasks whenever we please. Because they are automated, it cuts our workload from something that is pretty much impossible to something that is quite easy to maintain. I think this is critical for a startup, as it means we can move fast and add more features for our users.
If you're also trying to automate part of your business, I recommend checking out https://realpython.com/asynchronous-tasks-with-django-and-celery/ for a good write up on the subject. We now have a critical part of our product automated and are well on our way to getting our first beta!
What other tools do you use to automate part of your business?
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Just out of curiosity, have you looked into the usual automation tools like make/integromat, n8n or even Zapier before setting up your system with celery? Would that have been possible and/or faster ?
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Hey ToPe, Chainspy Co-founder here.
Truth be told, we did not look at online alternatives for this as it's just our internal tooling.
We do plan to have alert features in the future, which would integrate nicely with an online integration tool like Zapier however, so the user can do something E.g. Send an email when Bitcoin mining activity reaches below a threshhold.
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I use Rollideo to automate video creation.