Automate the boring parts of your job(stackoverflow.blog) |
Automate the boring parts of your job(stackoverflow.blog) |
And then the worst case I've found myself in is where the people you hire specifically to automate are told to do things manually at first "until we get the automation out." Then you end up in a constant cycle of promising automation that will never exist because all of the workload is falling to the automators who have no time to fix anything.
I caught my manager one day, manually traversing application screens taking screenshots and then clipping them down to size.
At least an hour's work, with each and every release (or at least those with configuration changes).
"Raise a ticket, I can do that automatically."
An hour later I sent her back the task for testing - now taking mere seconds, and with pixel perfect clipping.
It never even occurred to her to ask if that was something I could do.
Can you elaborate what you did? One option I can think of - Selenium like UI testing\navigation tool and taking screenshots?
I ran through the configuration definitions and for each element created a BufferedImage the preferred size of the associated component.
Then I rendered the component to the BufferedImage using BufferedImage::getGraphics, and Component::paint.
Then I saved the image as <definition>.PNG.
Nothing magical.
Or just deepfake your face and voice and give it a new prompt every day.
- Is It Worth The Time? https://xkcd.com/1205/
- Automation https://xkcd.com/1319/
I don't write "reusable" automations - I don't write scripts with parameters. I write a lot of scripts where I open it in notepad to edit and fill in variables.
Most of the times I just put copies of these scripts on specific servers and have variables filled in.
Variables need to change only if I change server or really change config of a server which is almost never.
This way "Automation" xkcd "Theory" fits reality.
Because then instead of rehearsing commands and what was the configuration I just go to the server and run the script and instead 30mins simple task takes me 2 mins.
The reality (for me at least, and I’m sure for others) is that I’d much rather be writing a program than doing drudge work.
The other thing is that a task that takes 30 seconds doesn't just take 30 seconds, the context switch is actually quite a burden and even just having to remember to do the thing.
Would you rather have 10% errors each time or 10% of the time the script has an error and could wipe everything out.
Every place I've worked with accepts 10% returns, 10% of visitors leaving immediately, 10% of a customer's data being incorrect somehow.
Very few accept perfect flawless followed by completely breaking everything 1/10 times.
All I'm saying is that the true costs of manual work usually isn't accounted for correctly. I see these costs spiralling into so much wasted work that it starts incurring more and more risk. Preference for gradual decay over Big Bang collapses isn't nessecarily rational, people tend to prefer living next to coal plants than nuclear plants despite the fact they're far far far more likely to die living next to the coal plant. It is in fact that irrational bias which needs to be resisted.