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by ravedave5 2108 days ago
I read about a really cool way to move to having stuff automated - on here I think. You make a bash script as an interactive checklist (e.g. step 1 flip the floop then press Y to continue) and then you can automate steps one by one as time permits. You can also have a log of the steps being done then as well.
2 comments

The primary benefit of automating small/ (mundane?) things is that it gets rid of a some of the cognitive load.

For example, I wrote some shell scripts, gradle/TC plugins, when my company moved to kubernetes/openshift. We did not have devops, paas standardization then. The scripts are now getting used in many projects in a couple of departments. And it was just word of mouth adaption. It is as not very fancy stuff nor is it a company wide standard. But it is useful and it hides/gets rid of complexity which new projects/developers no longer have to worry about. Danger area: trying to be too generic, parameterize everything, you end up with frameworks and processes. As a senior dev, I generally aim at solving my problem and if possible making the solution usable in the immediate vicinity. Keeping it minimal and simple makes it usable for others when the problem is not exact match.

I've done this!!! It works _great_! I have a setup script that new employees run and I never quite figured out how to automate one of the steps, so it just prints "Go to www.example.com/whatever and paste in the API key it generates below." It's been 1.5 years and it's still chuggin' along just fine.