Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by malandrew on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:31AM (#34335720)

I have a love-hate relationship with runbooks. I see them as tech debt for things you haven’t yet automated or made clear enough. If someone needs to go read a doc to understand what they need to do, you’re already behind.

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Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by PebblesRox on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @08:33AM (#34338198)

I can't find it now but I remember reading a post on HN with the suggestion to make all your runbooks shell scripts, even if all they start out as a series of prompts walking the user through the checklist of manual tasks.

This way you can incrementally automate various pieces of it so that gradually the user is doing less and less, but there's continuity on their end: run the script and do whatever it says to do next.

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Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by TheFlyingFish on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @12:49PM (#34341675)

I'm guessing this is "Do-nothing scripting: The key to gradual automation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083367

Although the example uses Python, rather than shell.

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Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by PebblesRox on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:40PM (#34342537)

That’s it, thank you!

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Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by dougsillars on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @02:09PM (#34343013)

I love this idea! The automate the easy bits (or the steps that are the biggest pain/time suck) until the whole thing is completed.

A tool like Jupyter Notebooks would be great for this - comments & code can be placed into a single document. I'm working on a project called unSkript (https://unskript.com) that is built on this idea.

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