Automation is a big part of DevOps, but are you practicing DevOps if you do not automate every single thing? I'd like to talk about where automation fits into DevOps, how to go about scripting "all the things" and why sometimes it is not necessary. Personal story of how one Ruby script saved me and my friends a bunch of time that could be used to do things slightly more exciting than copy/pasting to spreadsheets. Plus my quick API 101 lesson...
2. How to Automate Yourself
out of a Job
judy johnson
Software Engineer
Onyx Point
@miz_j
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3. A Day in the Life...
My job titles (alphabetically):
● Member of fun committee
● ScrumMaster
● Software Engineer
● System Engineer
● Team Lead
● (other duties as assigned)
○ Customer support
○ Documentation
○ Jira
○ Meetings
○ Reporting
And when I am not at work…
● Bake cookies, cakes
● Catch up with my kids (both my daughters
are engineers)
● Enjoy nature - walk every Saturday
● Go to concerts
● Try to read actual books
● Volunteer (college, high school, middle
school, women in tech)
● Watch Hockey Games (Go Caps! Bruins!)
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I love deadlines. I like the
whooshing sound they make as
they fly by.
~ Douglas Adams
12. Why do people fear automation
● Fear of losing a job
● Don’t trust what they can’t control
● Lack of knowledge of tools
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“Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL
9000 computer."
– HAL 9000 - 2001: A Space Odyssey
13. The CLI (Command Line Interface)
and the API (Application Program Interface)
● Accessibility (screen-readers are happier with plain text)
● Easy to read and recreate/repeat
● Often too many options to fit on a readable GUI screen
...or too much output to view at once
● Return data in a format for reuse (.csv, .json, etc)
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14. CLIs
● Easy to read and recreate (pkzip)
● Can fit more into less space/time
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15. APIs
● “a set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that
access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other
service.” – Wikipedia
● Get data needed from a function call rather than navigating
● Data is returned in a readable format
● Data can be manipulated before presented to the end user
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20. Quotations
“If you automate a process that has errors, all you’ve done is automate the generation of
those errors.” – W.L.W. Borowiecki
“Any daily work task that takes 5 minutes will cost over 20 hours a year, or over half of a
work week. Even if it takes 20 hours to automate that daily 5 minute task, the automation
will break even in a year.” – Anthony J. Stieber
"I will always choose a lazy person for a difficult job. Because, he will find an easy way to do
it." – Bill Gates
“You can’t automate stupid!” – Kitt
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