Automate Everything

Stop me if you have heard this one before. No don't read this again.

Back in 1988-89 I had a job as an assistant systems operator working for a really cool guy named Jason. Mostly I ran backups and did other really simple SysOp work and I probably spent more time learning csh and making patch cables for the machine room than doing much else. But I still learned a lot in this job. 

The most important lesson I learned was, automate everything.

It came up one day that there seemed to be a lot of idle time in the life of a SysOp. Roughly 80% of the time was available for projects like 'make patch cables' or 'clean the attic'. So I asked Jason one day, 

"How is it that we have so much spare time? When are we doing to do some SysOp-ing.?"

He said, "We are! Everything is automated. When I come into the office in the morning I check my email. I review the reports generated by the automated scripts, and if nothing is wrong I have to make stuff up for us to do all day." 

At the time it was sort of a "Ha Ha" moment and I didn't think about it too much. Years later I realized, Jason and the other Real SysOps™ had automated every single tasks they had to perform on a regular basis. They needed guys like me to change the tapes in the ExoByte drive, but not much else. And as long as things went well, there wasn't much to do.

That left lots of free time for other pursuits. Like thinking about how to make things better, more automated. They were basically working to eliminate their own jobs. As a consequence they could work on more interesting things (homework, pet projects, etc.). I wish I'd had a clue back then, but I have one now. 

By automating away all the mundane things we can create more space to think through tough problems, innovate, or just generally sleep better. 

So have been applying this sort of thinking since back in the day, generally with good success. I admit, sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out how to automate things. I certainly have grown to despise things that are hard to manipulate with scripts and macros. What I've gotten in the end is a fairly simple life. 

One example is a side project I'm working on. I've automated nearly everything. I did it in the Unix Way (small, atomic/acidic scripts that only do one thing). I can use all that automation to my advantage. When my partners in mischief call with an issue I can usually bang out two or three simple commands to 'fix things'. Or send instructions like "Run script X. Delete thing Y. Then restart with command such-and-such". Honestly, if I could anticipate the contortions in advance, I could get most of this down to one script.

What this has given me is the opportunity to think about the Hard Parts™ of the system and then arrive at clever solutions. Rather than spend days trying to build a DAL for the application, I spent a day deriving a generic library that works across all of the domain objects and tables. How'd I do that? Well, I didn't spend all day manually coding up a bunch of one-off objects, I automated the construction, testing, and deployment of those things. The test cycle is about 6 seconds. I was able to iterate over my clever solution so fast that it was almost (but not quite) painless to create. 

Automation is your friend. It may not be sexy and glorious, but it will enable you to do great things. So go out there and automate everything.