The Bad Side Of Automation

I love automation. I mean it. Not just in production where it is mandatory (you can't run the continuous integration tests by hand, can you?), but during development too, hack I do it even when I have to download a song. There is nothing better than making the computer orchestrate all of your work (well ice cream might be better) and I don't think I'm the only one that prefers writing a good script to get the job done instead of doing it myself.

Just make a confession:

• If you have to click 150 links in a website will you click them or will you make python do it?
• You have to deploy an application server - will you follow the instructions or look in Dockerhub?
• You need a CentOS VM - will you download the iso and install it yourself or look for an OVF?
• You have to download songs for your friend's car audio - will you download the by hand or get them from youtube with a script?

How can you match the feeling when you're doing a docker pull instead of downloading the source for an application, building it, configuring the database and then seeing it not working because you had to add a rule to iptables?

But there is one bad side to so much automation - the waiting. I can't count the times when I've opened 4 shells, typed in some commands and then started staring out of the window. Have you ever wondered why Hackernews has so many Devops and infrastructure related articles, because Puppet and Ansible can do the work while the guys are blogging (now you know why I started the blog...)