Show HN: Taro – making cron jobs fun again

Creator here!

As developers, every now and then we come up with cool ideas of things to automate. I remember a few years back when I first started learning how to code and was looking for an apartment in San Francisco, I felt like the world’s cleverest hacker when I set up a script to email every new listing on CraigsList in the neighborhoods I was interested in living in. (This had some disastrous consequences, but that’s a story for another time.)

My only problem at the time was that I would have to manually run this script myself every day. Now, as a more experienced developer, I know enough to know that one approach to this problem is to set up a cron job, or something similar. Recently I found myself wanting to do this again… but every time I want to do it, it takes some effort to remind myself how it all works. At first I thought, maybe I’m just an idiot. But after talking to a few friends, we realized that a bunch of us have the exact same issue. (Though maybe we're all idiots, haha)

So we figured, why not build a little tool that makes this process extremely simple? This is what led to the creation of Taro.

We'd love to hear the community's thoughts on integrations that would be particularly useful (e.g. alerting with SMS, lightweight storage, etc) as we continue to hack on this!