Hackernews shared the other day a project using github actions to generate a nice readme for your base Github profile. That workflow uses rust to query the github API and get some stats to then insert into the README.

Two things I noticed I did not realize you could do with actions previously; 1) you can schedule actions to run on a regular basis via a cron job, 2) you can push to the repo inside of the action. (And this does not cause some infinite recursion with actions.) So I have updated my profile to run some python code, generating an image of the number of potholes filled in Raleigh per week.

And you can see that this was updated on 4/7, and that was the automated job that was re-run.

It is pretty simple python code. You just have to have a step in your actions to build the python environment, then you can run your code.

With the regular cron job, you could offload different pieces of work to github, say automate scraping a site or sending out emails once a week. You just need to have a python (or whatever language) script to automate that process. Or you could do more fancy analysis for a project, and post that in the readme via a Jupyter notebook script. If the source data can be downloaded via the internet anyway.