Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
blog.danslimmon.com
Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
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Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#2I love things like this. Mindbendingly simple ideas that rely purely on overturning preconceived notions about what things are "worth" a certain amount of effort. There's a tautological, cart-before-horse paradox in many cases.
Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#3This seems like a surprisingly powerful and should-be-obvious kind of idea... I think I'll start making use of it!
Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#4Very nice idea, Dan! This reminds me of the power of checklists that has been discussed here a few times: Simple but highly effective.
It allows for a pretty natural transition:
- (Markdown) Manual
- Do-nothing-script (printing out the manual in steps)
- Partial automation
- Full automation
Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#5I can't help looking at this and working out how to build a tool that can generate a Do Nothing script straight from your histfile, making the business of archiving the commands you just executed as easy as possible too...
Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#6Nice idea! I'm actually in the process of automating a task bit by bit. Unfortunately it's with the intention of moving it into a CI pipeline, so the "success" there is rather binary, but I will most definitely adopt this process in future.
Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#7Great idea! From personal experience I can say that there are some things ops teams never get around to automate, either because there is always something more important to do, or because it would be too expensive to have a developer spend time automating them. This is a simple, quick solution that solves the problem of accidentally skipping a subtask, thus screwing something up and feeling stupid for doing so.
Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#8This is a really great idea, and appealing in its simplicity -- I think we might try to implement this in my company for some of our tasks which are really very manual, but for which automation is a daunting task.
Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#9I can't help looking at this and working out how to build a tool that can generate a Do Nothing script straight from your histfile, making the business of archiving the commands you just executed as easy as possible too...
If you're about to do a sequence of commands into a terminal, you can create a transcript with the 'script $filename' command ('script' command is in the util-linux package', according to the man page), and it will capture input/output into the transcript. This would probably make this task easier, since you could see the output data, and how the output data is transformed into arguments into the next command ...
Re: Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
#10I get it, but this script looks a lot like a checklist to me. Seems like a checklist is a good place to start, no?
If you want more "interest" during the process, make it a point to refine the documentation for your process (clarify a step here, split one command into two steps). Then you have a very clear spec by the time the process needs to be automated.