[djacob93]

Hey Hari,

this might be a very newbie sort of question, but i genuinely want to know. I noticed you said, "I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs", but for your website https://visalist.io, how do you make sure the info displayed on your website regarding the different travel rules stays updated, because I guess these rules change very frequently now a days with covid

[monsieurbanana]

3 possibilities I can think of:

- automatically scrapping websites - paying someone to do the work manually - who knows, there might be a database that someone else maintains, free or paid, and the website just displays the information

Or a mix of all that.

[kingofpandora]

Or the information isn't up-to-date ... This is the kind of thing you always should check on an embassy or other government page.

[sillycube]

Finally, the visitors will go to the official site to verify the visa requirements. When the covid is around, the visa requirements are changed by the gov frequently

[kqr]

Well, how would you operationally define updated? Would you, as a traveller, be satisfied if it's no more than two days out of date?

How long does it take to check and update the information for one country? Let's call it 90 seconds when you have the routine in. (Maybe every tenth time you check you have to actually change something in your database and that takes 10 minutes, the rest of the time you change nothing and that takes half a minute.)

There are about 200 countries in the world, so updating them all takes on average five hours. If you only need to do that every other day, that's quite literally 10 % of your time to do manually.

Now it could probably be optimised -- some countries might not be as popular destinations, and others might not change their rules as often. This is data you get for free from the effort of maintaining it. You can use that to adjust frequencies and I'm sure get it down to just 3 % of your time or less. That's while still doing it manually!

Then if there are some places that are really popular or change really often, you can start automating the updates for those countries. Since they are the ones you'd spend the most time on updating manually otherwise, you can probably get it down to less than 1 % of your time.

But never forget to start by doing things that don't scale. You can get very far with a good manual process. Automate only when you have a good manual process and you've driven the last inefficiency out of it.

[jackdh]

5 hours every ten days is not 10% of most people working time.

Assuming an 8 hour work day that's closer to 30%. Even at 12 hours that's 20% and that's not including weekends.

[kqr]

I think we can both agree that 10 % of someone's working time is not a very well defined amount of time. 10 % of your total time seems like the more reasonable interpretation.

[powerapple]

5 / (8*10) = 0.625

5 / (8*10*5/7) = 0.875. (excluding weekends)

If you take into account annual leaves, say 25 days, it is still below 10%