Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h failing to automate it

Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by colechristensen on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:48PM (#29501297)

Opposite perhaps clarifying advice:

Do it by hand at least once or twice before trying to automate it.

Doing it by hand often teaches unexpected lessons and can shorten the automation effort.

I have seen far too often the jump from never done a thing to preparing to do a thing a million times a day.

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Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by downut on Thursday December 09, 2021 @02:16PM (#29501639)

I am not sure this is opposite advice, really. I make myself do an ops thing by hand, for a period of time. Eventually the repetitive parts begin to really annoy me. Then I automate the repetitive parts.

But I am deeply lazy. My father made me count fish hooks by hand from bulk into those dozen boxes for his fishing tackle wholesale business. I was, maybe 8? Couple of cents per box. Couldn't stand it. So I eyeballed batch sizes, and made mistakes. Should've weighed them. Boy did he get mad. But nope, no way I was going to count every one of those little hooks.

That's the way I feel about the repetitive parts of ops. It takes a while to figure out the repetitive bits though, and abstract those correctly.

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