Comment by tester34 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tester34 | Hacker News Reader

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Probably Charlatan here, AMA

Our $company lacked of automation of some process and after months of wasting hours doing it manually I decided to automate that.

I had no exp with real ci/cd tools and thought our process was already crazy enough (using annoying source control tool, heavy dependency between compilation and external soft's specific versions) that we need to build our tool to manage it.

I built MVP as CLI and it worked. As time passed everybody wanted to add tons of stuff to it - like Web GUI, history, logs, managing software versions when creating binaries and even performing code analysis (because we were heavily dependent on 3rd software we needed to detect some colissions)

Overall, it saved us from doing hundreds manual, sometimes error-prone tasks per year. It allowed us to add customizations like that code analysis using compiler's API

But the other hand maybe we could just use some Jenkins or some shit and achieve similar stuff without having to invest time into it and maintain - it's combo of Visual Studio + MS Build + Team Foundation Version Control + .NET Framework, so stuff tends to make problems from time to time

I feel that despite all good things that this project brought, then we could just use existing tool and maybe achieve similar results, but I don't know for sure.

I feel like sometimes I used this project to escape boring CRUDing and used it as a learning opportunity - maybe I abused it too much?

Or maybe should I treat it as "Google's 20%"?

This is a completely different scenario and, also, a not so subtle humble brag.

You're duct taping process onto an existing product cycle.

I've experienced the 'X' factor the author is talking about and it's something like "we're moving everything to Linux because that's what I do" and then you go 18 months without a release and the release you do make is a bugfix release to the old infrastructure, your customers leave and you get bought for debt.

>a not so subtle humble brag.

I'm not sure how could I rewrite it to avoid that feel, yet still include enough details to let people kinda evaluate whether it was reasonable or not

Maybe what you did WAS reasonable ...there is process automation where there was none before. Or did the project/company fail because you can't ship anymore?

It didn't (yet?)

Lol! Celebrate your success!

IMHO: This is natural growth without mentorship. You build solutions beyond your level and where other people are not, and then question whether they were the right thing to do. With experience you start to learn when to build, when to buy, when to delegate, etc. Its all part of growing into a responsible leader. Answers are not always clear but my "Gonna guess cause your asking" view is that you aren't working with seasoned engineering leaders who can help guide you. Which is very common IME. Good for you for questioning and thinking about how to evaluate the decisions you made which impact others. If you find experienced leaders to guide you, you may grow faster and with less anxiety. But if you do not, continuing to find ways to improve your decision making and think about how it impacts others will set your course for growth.

Some people don't really care about all that and just build whatever keeps them interested and then move on and that's the end of their thought process. You don't seem like that, so I would guess you are not a Charlatan, whatever the correctness of your prior decision(s).

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