Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation

NAME="$1"

# Create directory for the code

mkdir "$NAME"

# Checkout the source

cd $NAME && git something

# and so on

Sometimes with an echo "You need to read and understand this before just using it"; exit 1 thrown in somewhere for good measure.

These files will have no logic, and make very little use of variables. They will also have a .txt filename to ensure that people understand, that first of all, this is a set of instructions for how to do something, which just so happens to be a valid bash script.

It allows for a pretty natural transition:

- (Markdown) Manual

- Do-nothing-script (printing out the manual in steps)

- Partial automation

- Full automation

Doing manual steps sucks, wouldn't it be great if this was automated for the next person? Be the change you want to see in the world.

But all this gets back to something I used to say a lot, and the more refined version I say now. I used to say "Have humans do what humans do well; have computers do what computers do well". The key part of that was the idea that computers can't do what humans do. Now, I say "Anything a computer can do well, a human cannot do well". Which includes those pesky twenty step manual processes.

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.

These scripts organize tasks into flows in a way that makes it possible to split work by logical checkpoints. The tasks between these checkpoints are dependent on one another in the overall flow, but have independent implementations that can be delegated to software or done by humans.

I can see the usage in an isolated team of a few people that will write these scripts for their own benefit.

I am opposed in general with having scarce information around. Better have everything a single place, whether that's a guide on how to provision a user or is how to add a new endpoint to your API or write a new end to end test.

I mention this because I worked at a company where checklists were typically simply added to a wiki and required separate processes for things like peer review.

An example is approving new users to access a service. Say your list of users is a YAML file. Someone edits the file, fires off a PR, waits for someone to approve it, merges it, and applies the config. You might think it's so easy to do by hand, automating it would be a waste. But if you actually add up the time it takes for humans to do those steps, plus the lead-time from creation to completion, plus the occasional typo, wrong username, or Norway bug, it can take from hours to days to actually complete the task. By automating steps one at a time, you gradually move toward the entire process being a single script that takes a username, and completes the task in about 30 seconds. This is a small win, but added up over all your operations, reduces hundreds of hours of toil and reduces human error. If every engineer automates one step of one runbook per week, over a year you'll have hundreds of reusable automation steps.

To the OP, I'd add the following: 1) use the least-complex way to accomplish the task. If you don't need to write Python, don't. Bourne shell is your friend. Re-use existing tools and automated features. 2) Add documentation to the code that can be auto-generated, so you can use the script as long-lived static documentation. Documenting somewhere else will lead to stale docs. 3) Run all your runbooks from a Docker container. 4) Plan to run these runbooks-in-containers from a CI/CD system using paramaterized builds. 5) Organize your reusable automation steps by technology, but have product-specific runbooks that call the automated features. 6) In a big org, a monorepo of automation features is an efficient way to expose automated features to other teams and ramp up on shared automation quicker.

I start with my "template" script and fill it out.

totally over-engineered for most tasks, but then as the tasks mature they have a firm foundation.

very simplified example:

    #!/usr/bin/python
    import sys,os,argparse

    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(argument_default=None)
    parser.add_argument('-d', '--debug',     action='store_true',  help='debug flag')
    parser.add_argument('files', nargs='*',  default=[],           help='files to process')
    arg = parser.parse_args()

    def die(errmsg,rc=1):
        print(errmsg, file=sys.stderr)
        sys.exit(rc)
    
    if not arg.files:
        die('filename required')

Last time, I figured I'd start going at it gradually. So what I did was I turned the checklist into a bash script, telling me what to do at each step. I also implemented the ones that are easy to automate. The plan is to knock out two or three items each time I do the backup, until it's fully automated.

It's basically the minimal version of a standalone workflow automation; it's got crappy state storage and is really only good for a single human execution unit per script (or perhaps multiple swapped sequentially rather than in parallel), but it's an instance of a fairly well-known class of do-something software.

https://gist.github.com/mbarkhau/60fc4bbe505914369ebd2fec1ab...

I'm very much against documenting concrete steps in a wiki if it is something that can be scripted. Such documentation becomes something that you must maintain, and faulty documentation is worse than no documentation.

I think that wiki documentation should be used to summarize workflows and provide context, but if you're writing step-by-step instructions, often you can just write a script with exactly the same amount of effort.

I call it Hoist - from "hoisting up" concrete, hard-coded values into abstract symbols for reuse. It's complete vaporware at this point, just a place to collect my thoughts for a future essay.

I stumbled into doing roughly the same in my macOS system bootstrap script. I found it from the other side, though--usually only after failing to find a good way to automate a step, or realizing automation would be vastly more complex/fragile than just prompting myself to do something manually at the right time.

Probably a more useful concept when it's conscious from the getgo. :)

if you are working at enterprise - then these processes gotta be implemented according to ITIL in a specialized IT Service Management system - like ServiceNow, which allows building process flows like directed acyclical graphs and automation of necessary steps

However, I don't think it's a good idea. Checklists are not bad, but they are to be executed by humans.

I think trying to automate an existing human process directly is a mistake. Human processes often have features that only humans can do, such as pattern recognition or adapting to small difference. It's often easier to create a computerized (automated) process from scratch than to try to account for all the edge cases that humans might have to deal with (and do without problems).

(The opposite is also true, processes that computers have no issues with can make trouble for humans. For example, humans have imperfect memory. So if the process asks humans to keep track something for extended periods, it can be difficult.)

1. Write SQL to automate

2. Put SQL with output in Metabase

3. Have it manually checked alongside day-to-day operation

4. Iterate 1-3 (you often will get a lot of feedback)

5. Replace the manual work, now that the SQL it checked on a lot of cases in production

Whats a good way to generalize such a python script so that windows and nix users can run it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717715

The whole point of public keys is that the private key never has to leave the box it’s generated on. Once you go sharing them you might as well just use a random passphrase.