Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

So I’m pursuing a goal where my business is automated 100% end to end, from marketing to billing. It’s not easy. You have to automate stuff, then you have to automate monitoring, then you have to automate responses to monitoring. You have to plug all the terminal paths, i.e., any path that leads to human intervention. You have to pick problems that don’t have too many terminal paths.

See, I like to code things for myself and clients. I hate to market, I hate to make phone calls, I hate to do invoices. I hate making specs. I hate estimating. I hate lame ideas. I pretty much hate everything except the pure kernel of goodness that is actual enduring work and would prefer that everyone just trust me when I say how great I am and move forward on that basis. But not everyone does.

So I’m wading around in cron jobs, init.d scripts, crawlers, indexers, autoresponders, and any other sort of self-service tool.

I’m being pragmatic about it, and here’s the point of the post: the first time something blocks me from good work, I stop to automate. That’s my simple strategy. I see a leak, I plug it. I am not sitting back thinking about which leak to plug first or how best to plug it. I plug it and move on. That’s why stuff like daemontools is potentially interesting to me (I’ll write about that next).

I can feel the tides turning. Once I have things automated and then automated monitors to check and restart things that fail, the path should be cleared for actual work. Monitors may not be that far away from a self-healing type of system too. When an exception is escalated to me and I fix it, I’m going to seek to fix it first by making sure it never happens again, or if I can’t do that, automate whatever I did to fix it.