Weekly Reflection #34 - Automation and toil
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe)
Insight
I've been working with someone recently, migrating a manual, multi-step process out of Excel and into a Python workflow. It requires significant upfront work. You have to understand the task before you can automate it. But when you find the right solution, the whole thing runs without you. It's a thing of beauty.
Effective automation drives the toil of a task toward zero.
Wisdom
If a human operator needs to touch your system during normal operations, you have a bug.
Carla Geisser, Site Reliability Engineering: Eliminating Toil
Reflection
What do you keep doing by hand and calling normal?
Lagniappe
- We can't forget the pitfalls of premature automation though. Of course XKCD has a great comic for this.
- This week on Book Overflow, we discuss the first few chapter of We, Programers by Robert Martin
- As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Reply and let me know what resonates.