Make It Routine

The first one is hard. The rest are boring.

I hear this statement from someone recently, and it sounds like something a technical person would do with a task. It’s often been a goal of mine, or maybe a direction to aim, that I want to make things easier with some script or automation. Sometimes I think it’s more aspirational than actual. I might want to make most things routine and automated, but that doesn’t always work out.

The first time I tackle something, it should be hard. It’s new work. It’s a new process/code/thought/action/etc. It’s unfamiliar and I spend more time on it than I want. After that, I’d hope I could repeat the thing again in much less time. That’s the goal, and that’s what we aim for in a lot of DevOps work. Make the things we think are hard, less hard. Make them boring by codifying things, using automation, have the computer replicate the things.

I think the second time I tackle a task is often hard as well. How often have you tried to reproduce something you did and can’t quite get it? Heck, I now depend (and use) SQL History constantly because I will write some code, change it a bunch, and then realize that I can’t reproduce the version that did the thing (or broke the thing) I was working on. I need to rewind things and figure them out again. Usually by the 4th time I’ve done something, it’s starting to become easier. By the 10th its boring.

Unless I’m playing guitar, in which case, some things take a few more reps than 10.

I’ve had plenty of developers say never repeat yourself. If you can automate it, you should. In practice, that’s hard. Sometimes I’m unsure of whether I’ll do something again, or often enough to spend the time automating it. There are also times I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. I spent a day once trying to automate a bunch of Outlook appointments, only to realize the whole Office API and deluge of information out there made this much harder than the 15 minutes a year I spend putting in all my Database Weekly reminders.

I don’t want to discourage you from automating things and making them routine or boring. My database deployments ought to be routine. The daily checks should be so boring and automated that I don’t bother with them because I know the machine is doing the work and will let me know if there is something I should examine. The efforts to refresh dev dbs, or respond to audit requests, or even reset a password ought to be boring and easy. Some of us build ways to smooth these tasks and ease our jobs, and some of us treat every one as an ad hoc thing that we do over and over.

The over and over stuff is going to be taken over by AI. Maybe soon, maybe in a few years, but a lot of simple stuff that you keep doing, that mindless, tedious stuff that doesn’t require a lot of thought, is going to be handled by AI agents. Either you’ll direct them, or your boss will ask someone else to do it after you leave. AI can handle things like figuring out disks are full and cleaning out old log files, shrinking disks, archiving things, and then writing scripts (and scheduling them) to prevent issues. If that’s your job, your days are numbered.

Make things routine by thinking about the pattern, how we could reduce or eliminate a lot of labor, and how we can use a computer to handle them. Even better, learn how to guide an AI to do that work and prove your worth to your employer.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.