The procedure goes something along the lines of "RTC trigger wakes up sleeping computer, computer waits to connect to network, opens spotify url of playlist." It lets me turn off the LED and fan nightmare that is my desktop and still use it as an alarm.
Starts my vim instance, bash prompt, sources virtualenv, server instances, and console/repl.
I start-up in about 5 seconds.
Subscription renewals are a little script that runs daily. If the charge is declined, a mail gets sent and a date for the next reattempt is set in the database for when the script should try again.
A series of charge attempts and mails go out on a schedule asking the customer to update their payment information or get in touch. The mails are all prewritten, and at least 75% of subscriptions are recovered through this automated process.
It saves time, I don't have to handle following up on declined charges myself (which I hate to do manually), and it's worth six figures a year compared to just letting subscriptions lapse because of one declined charge.
2. Off-site backups and code that validates they're complete and restore-able. It's peace of mind. No server runs forever; you will eventually need that backup.
(At the time we had to deal with "stored procedures" with tens of input and output parameters, and testing these was a time-consuming and error prone problem, people would save invoking scripts, running them to find what had changed in the parameters list and manually update them).
(1) A 4GL proprietary language. Just think of PL/SQL with the practical parts surgically removed.
