Don’t Repeat Yourself – This is an important mantra, I’m trying to work like this for the past years, but the fancy abbreviation never came up my mind, I just found it online. What does it mean? We system administrators often have repeating tasks that we should automate. This has two purposes:
Time is expensive
Things that are automated don’t consume your time, your time is expensive so we all should use it wisley. Automating an assignment often takes longer than doing it one or two times by hand. But how long does it take if your colleage, who doesn’t know the system, has to do it by hand. Or how long do you need if you need to do it again in three years and you forgot almost everything?
Deterministic stuff is important
An assignment often consists of multiple tasks, and people often forget one or a few tasks and than the complete assignment fails. This won’t happen if you automate it wisley. Points for a good automatization:
- Testable
- Deterministic
- Repeatable
- Idempotent
Do you know any other important points? Let me know!
the DRY mantra is an essential point for beeing a good system administrator so I added it to the Sysadmin Manifesto
Pingback: Sysadmin Manifesto | the world needs more puppet!