Taking Action While You Sleep: Using GitHub Actions to Schedule Email Updates
Lighting Talk, 10:55 - 11:20 AM
Keeping your audience informed shouldn’t be a manual chore. When Megan set out to streamline email updates for her local running group, she realized that manually checking for new events and sending emails was time consuming and tedious. Automating the process with a local script was an option—but keeping her computer on 24/7? Not ideal. Instead, she turned to GitHub Actions, a cloud-based automation tool, to handle everything while she slept.
In this lightning talk, Megan will demonstrate how to automate a workflow using R and GitHub Actions. She’ll walk through fetching events from Google Calendar with {ical}, formatting email content with {quarto}, sending emails via {blastula}, and scheduling it all seamlessly in GitHub Actions.
By the end of this talk, attendees will see how GitHub Actions can take repetitive tasks off their plate, whether for email updates, report generation, or other automated workflows—even while they sleep.
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Pronouns: she/herRenton, WA, USAMegan Holtorf is the Data & Analytics Manager at Providence's Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CORE), where she works closely with researchers and community partners to evaluate innovative healthcare programs and advance health services research. Megan has extensive experience analyzing large administrative data sets, surveys, and civic data. She has been the analytic and technical lead for a multi-year statewide evaluation of philanthropic investments in community health equity, evaluated alternative payment models and other health reform initiatives within Oregon's coordinated care system, and led development of statewide quality metric dashboards. |