Automation

Let me be clear: I’m not lazy. I’m really lazy. There’s a difference. A lazy person skips the work. A really lazy person spends a whole Saturday building a machine so they never have to do that work again. It suits the name. Bufon means jester, and the jester was the one person at court who never carried anything. He juggled, told the king the truth and let the servants do the rest. My servants are a GitHub workflow and a cron job. They don’t get paid either. In Get on the bike! I wrote that you should do something by hand once, script it the second time and automate it when it annoys you again. Publishing posts had reached step three.

You probably know a team like this. Servers get built by hand. Settings get clicked through one machine at a time. Changes on critical systems are done in an RDP session, and GPOs, templates and Ansible are nowhere to be seen. Every server is a little different, and only the person who built it knows why. It’s ClickOps, and it’s still everywhere, especially in teams that have “always done it this way.” To me it looks like a team running beside their bike, sweating and out of breath, when they could just get on it.