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Title: On not doing anything
Author: Bob Schmidt
Date: 10 January 2020 18:18:21 +00:00 or Fri, 10 January 2020 18:18:21 +00:00
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No-one likes to be called in the middle of the night with the news that some system is down and needs to be fixed right now. Of course, not everyone reading this works in an environment where that happens, but I suspect there are quite a few who have experienced the weary trudge into the office in the middle of the night to try and find out what’s going on. Few of us operate at our best when roused from our beds under such conditions. Which is why it’s exactly this example that I give when I am asked what I mean by saying I’m a Lazy Developer.
Much of being lazy in this respect is about getting machines to do the work so that I don’t have to. Things like running the tests, or trawling the source code for simple errors. It’s a bit more subtle than the phrase “so I don’t have to†suggests: the machine is not only quicker than I would be, doing it by hand, it’s also much more reliable. Tedious, repetitive tasks are very prone to human error, so automating the boring stuff seems to me to make perfect sense.
The same thinking applies to software deployments. I like to be as easy as not even having to click a button, if I can, but I can manage a single button click. Sure, I can probably follow a page or two of instructions on scripts to run, files to copy, servers to log into, and so on, but truly, why should I? Running scripts and copying files to places are all things machines do very well, and better than I can.
There is much more to being lazy than not having anything to do, however. It’s all about confidence – mine, my team’s, by boss’s, and so on. I’m prepared to put a great deal of effort into being lazy later, if it means everyone is more confident things will just work. And especially if it means I’m confident I’m not going to get called up at 3am to fix a problem I caused because I wasn’t paying enough attention.
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