I'm not a programmer, but I do like to automate and my favorite way at the moment is using macros, bash scripts and WinAutomation - I can't believe how much can be automated this way. Email replies, online searches, software updates, website testing, testing content for uniqueness, proof reading and renaming files, taking screenshots, adding tasks to the calendar - everything can be automated using existing software and something to connect it all together (in my case, it's WinAutomation).

Obviously, it's not scalable, but anything that saves you an hour of sorting 500 files by category is a win in my book...