I spend a lot of time automating my own stuff
January 23, 2025
I got covid around Christmastime. I didn't really know I had covid, I just thought it was a bad cold… but one of the things about covid is that it really wipes you out. Total exhaustion. And then I started making mistakes.
The worst mistake was trying to move Christmas stuff around and knocking the big Santa figure we have off the porch, cleanly breaking his leg off. Clumsy. Stupid. Might not be able to fix him and it made me even more upset and… tired.
But… I also broke some code. We have a checkout process on the resume review page on MJL Projects. It's home grown so the checkout process integrates with the backend project management system making it easier to assign and manage the workflow. Only, remember, I had covid. I made a tweak, and my publishing process was “less than automated.” Basically I've been treating it all as beta or (even worse) development code. Except it's out in the public… someone tried to request a review and the button just plain didn't work.
This was because I still had the test keys in my production code. Classic junior engineer fail, and I should know better. Only in my exhausted befuddlement of covid, I skipped one of my manual steps and made that error and had a fail right out there in public for everyone to see.
As soon as I came out of my fog I started working on pipeline scripts. Set the right variables for the right environments, lock them away in a secure vault… actually use branches in my repository… do a clean pull and move… basic stuff we do in corporate things all the time but rarely for small side projects we're just playing with.
It's important to automate publishing because there are so many things that can break. Even this website (which at time of writing lives on an S3 bucket) has multiple steps to publish a blog post.
- Push the json file for this blog to S3
- Push the manifest.json file that displays all the articles in the menu
- Invalidate the manifest and the blog (if changed) in Cloudfront
Three steps to publish one blog. Easy. Unless I'm sick and befuddled… or in a hurry.. or trying to tell someone else how to do it. So, again, automation becomes critical. Now I have a UI where I can see what's changed since the last time I published, approve the changes, and then… publish.
Which feels like overkill for my personal blog, but… sometimes you need to to a little extra work to be lazy.
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