When to write automation
I've long fallen prey to ' oh, I'll only just do this once - no point automating it ', and it's really been just the last few years that things have changed. Two examples, taught to me by Mr. Mike Weeks , one of the best automation engineers I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Who is on-call? We were a small team, and every week the task came up to swap the on-call person in our Slack 'help-me' group ( the goalie/support request point person was the only member in that group ). It only took a few moments, but required you to check the Pagerduty schedule and then click around to get to the group and swap members. I was initially not advocating we deal with that toil as there were legitimate slow-burn fires on the go, but eventually we decided to spend the time. It took a few days of effort, but once in place the automation revealed something I hadn't seen at the time - the toil had a cost. Sure, it wasn't a lot of work, but it was addin...