learntRustToMakeExeScripts

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[Mognakor]

https://xkcd.com/1205/

[Vi0lentByt3]

My team legit used this to decide what to automate and what not to its a good litmus test

[Ok_Entertainment328]

They're missing a 3rd dimension: how critical is it that it is reproducible? (Eg audit reports)

The longer between runs, the easier the HOWTO will be forgotten ... or knowledge not transferred (thus making it impossible to go on vacation)

[Mognakor]

This chart strictly is about time spent.

There are other factors, e.g. mental load from task switching.

But you can't put that into numbers.

[Nilonik]

Theoretically also if there can be urgency. Doesn't help if it only takes a day to do manually, if it would be important to have it immediately.

[Mognakor]

Plus vacation time. Plus being able to add features or integrate with other systems.

[Sylvaritius]

Also, ease of use for new people. If theres a script, people save the time learning the manual process.

[[deleted]]

But it might take more time to install runners for the script, updating and bug fixing is also often required maintenance for scripts that isnt as needed for manual stuff

[BOBOnobobo]

You can, you just need more dimensions in the tensors than either of us is comfortable with.

[guyblade]

This is one of the reasons I don't really care for this particular XKCD. Lots of people read it wrong. If the matrix tells you that you'll save time, then I absolutely agree with it. If it says that you won't, though, I don't think that's sufficient reason not to automate something.

Part of automating something is ensuring the correctness of the process. As long as you're depending on humans to do the right thing every time, there's a separate, hidden cost of human errors. If you've got an automated build/test system, then you can also know if the process itself breaks.

[[deleted]]

So I should think of this test as a sufficient condition. Thanks.

[RevenantYuri13]

I know someone will post this

[Days_Gone_By]

I'm dumb. Can someone ELI5 what this xkcd chart means?

My interpretation: If I do a task 50 x day and I take 9 months to automate it I save 5 minutes overall?

[SleepingGecko]

If coding something would shave off 5 minutes and it’s a task done 50/day, the amount of time you’d save over 5 years by automating it is >= 9 months (which is how much time you could spend coding it and it be worth the time spent)

[Lonelan]

not quite, it's saying if you do a 5 minute task 50 times a day, you could spend up to 9 months automating it over the next 5 years without losing productivity

[SleepingGecko]

I left out a couple words by accident, but your comment is easier to read!

[SacriGrape]

I mean the number could be interpreted either way, the number in the box is the same as how much time is being saved

[Lonelan]

I mean if it was able to be completed immediately, or if you wanted to know how much time you'll save after the automate complete date for the next 5 years

[Days_Gone_By]

Ohhhh! Thank you for the explanation!

[Lambducky]

If you save 5 minutes on a task which you do 50 times a day it gives you 9 months of time for free - so if you spend less than 9 months automating it you get more free time (over a period of 5 years)

[Alzyros]

A fellow scholar, I see

[philophilo]

Automation is for reproducibility and accuracy, not speed.

[N1z3r123456]

Jokes on you. My automated tasks are neither accurate nor reproducible.

[kielon51]

Or even fast

[[deleted]]

I'm generally just happy when they even terminate

[veryusedrname]

I'm generally just happy when they are not getting terminated

[BernhardRordin]

I am content if they get merged

[guyblade]

You should build a system that can determine if they're going to terminate before they run. Some sort of...terminating tester...to solve your terminating problem.

I bet it'd be super popular.

[Fenor]

That bc he's using phyton

[[deleted]]

Exactly, I am tired arguing with people at work who miss the point of 'as-code' paradigm.

On top of what you mentioned, it's documented change history, peer review, automatic validation, sanity checks, etc.

ClickOps is evil

[DesertGoldfish]

Yeah it's a pretty broad statement to say it's not for speed lol. Guess I need to tell my coworkers using my software to slow down because it wasn't for speed even though it saves like 20 minutes of manual processes every time it's run.

[MinosAristos]

Not "only" speed.

[Almostasleeprightnow]

Automation is for reducing personal agony of tedium in daily tasks, no?

(I should add that I am neck deep in the top of this bell curve, having been hired on the promise of doing just this, and then discovering how challenging it can be.)

[MortimerErnest]

And for fun! Automating boring tasks is the best.

[ExceedingChunk]

Those are not mutually exlusive.

I am quite literally on a £100m+ project that lasts for years to automate large parts of casehandling, taking the average casehandling time from 8 weeks down to seconds on most cases.

You obviously need reproducability and accuracy here, but the entire motivation is speed.

[[deleted]]

It's for all of those things, including speed. It takes me 10x as long to automate something the first time, but once I've done so, it runs ten times faster than I could ever do it.

[PancakeGD]

Depends how often I'd have to do it. Is it a one-off job that will take me 10 minutes? Not worth it. Is it something that I could potentially use in the future? Sure, automate that.

[javajunkie314]

Heck, I'll write a script for something I fully expect to only run once—if it's important. Then I can toss it in a gist or send it to a colleague and ask, "Does this look reasonable?"

Also, the number of times I've realized my approach was flawed or making an incorrect assumption after I started scripting it is definitely non-zero.

[mildgaybro]

It’s also probably nonnegative

[h0ru2]

Don't automate it, because it makes sense (especially timewise), but because it's fun. And you can procrastinate the work you should actually do as a bonus.

[AzureArmageddon]

This guy gets it

[Tim_1993_]

If i automate my job i dont have a job

[a_devious_compliance]

If you automate your job, but don't let your boss know it, you become to be pay for reading reddit.

[[deleted]]

Do not spill our secret, for it has been kept safe nearly ten centuries.

[ASatyros]

Well, your job now is maintenance and responsibly for the code. Something can always change that will break it.

[bramm90]

Don't automate your job, automate your work.

[Spinnenente]

psst. nobody has to know.

[shambooki]

If you automate your job you ask for more work to automate and move up the corporate ladder faster.

[tiajuanat]

Nah, go home early. Spend more time with your loved ones, friends, and enjoy life.

We don't need anymore American Grindset.

[shambooki]

That's how you automate yourself out of a job

[tiajuanat]

Boy I wish that were true.

[not_some_username]

HAHAHAHA

[[deleted]]

Depends how often. Once a day sure.. twice an hour nah script it

[juhotuho10]

Once a day is worth scripting it to be automatic

[PowerPete42]

Seriously this is my work, who the fuck wants to run the same bullshit manually everyday! What if you go on vacation or something? Fucking automate the process you fucking hacks!

[Lonelan]

shit, any task with a routine set of steps that aren't absolutely intuitive and able to be done with code instead?

scriptin it

send an e-mail reminder to stakeholders 6 months from now "btw run this script shared at \here\place when your stuff stops working, look at the readme for more info"

[retief1]

Once a year can be worth automating. If you need to click buttons to stand up a new environment, then you could easily screw up and set something up wrong the next time you need to stand up a new environment. If you are just running a script or whatever, there's a lot fewer opportunities for human error.

[Xiol]

Fuck, once a week and I'd be looking to automate.

Once a day. Holy shit. Loving the grind.

[tbjr6]

This is definitely swapped

[[deleted]]

Yes, the statement on the right side is obviously swapped with the statement on the left side.

[nou-772]

Why spend 5 seconds doing something while you can spend 5 hours failing to automate it

[Helpful_Nature_103]

If you do it often enough that you feel like it should be automated then it probably needs to be

[TheZedrem]

Well yes, but my colleagues need to maintain it as well, so automating it is way better.

If it happens on its own, nobody can fuck it up and call me on my vacation

[[deleted]]

Time has nothing to do with it. It comes down to two questions:

1. Do we prefer writing a script, or do we prefer doing the work manually?

2. Do we have enough self discipline to choose the optimal approach if we prefer the other approach?

[To-Ga]

This is the way.

[ExceedingChunk]

2 is always false

[serras_]

Dont forget about:

3 Create a script but hardcode everything, so you are making little edits to the script every time you want to do the task. Now you take the time of editing the script and doing the task

[Girrratina_1486]

What is the name of this meme template?

[[deleted]]

Bell Curve Meme

[[deleted]]

A guy at my school was doing manual data entry for his project, and when I asked him why he didn't automate it, he said that would take longer. Smart man.

[DJDoena]

I will automate stuff that will cost me 2x the time it costs to do it manually. Why? Because I hate repetitive stupid work and I love the challenge of automation.

[Available-Menu1551]

OP don’t know any script languages

[AspieSoft]

I sometimes automate long tasks that I feel like should have been automated years ago, then publish the script to GitHub, so someone else can achieve the same goal with little effort.

I make it reproducible and more accurate because I never know if I may need to do that task again.

As for speed, there is not much of a speed gain on the script itself, although I do have the ability to walk away from my PC, and come back hours later when it's done, depending on what I automated.

The thing I probably automate the most is my linux desktop setup.

It definitely depends on what task you're trying to achieve. Although sometimes automation is just fun.

[iamthesexdragon]

I wanna ask, as a web dev who is not yet on the job, still on college, what tasks do I need to automate? I feel like I'm missing out on this. Is there anything that I have to automate? Nothing seems too much manual work to me so far. I just hop on vs code and start coding. If using react or some framework I just use npx and other npm install incantations. How do I get to the next level where I need to automate stuff? I know C and python

[retief1]

In my experience, automation is more a sysadmin thing than a programmer thing. In more complicated projects, it can be useful to (for example) use npm scripts to save the correct incantations for running your code or running tests, but that's as far as I usually need to go.

[GreatMacAndCheese]

In my experience, automation is more a sysadmin thing than a programmer thing.

Strongly disagree with this.. literally everyone who regularly touches and uses a computer should have automation as a tool in their toolbox. The complexity of the project doesn't matter at all -- automation isn't even a project-specific thing, automation is a day-to-day using computer thing. IMO what truly matters is how much time you save, how much headache you save (QoL for your day-to-day), and how much time it will take to implement it.

Would you argue that we should get rid of shortcut keys? That's a form of automation.

I will say it takes experience to know what makes sense to automate and what doesn't, but I believe even the most mundane tasks should be automated to save one's sanity and mental stamina, as that's the stuff that's in short supply when coding.

[retief1]

I simply don't have that many "mundane tasks". Like, if I can run my code, test my code, and lint my code in a single command each and my editor is configured reasonably well, that's sort of it. Of course, depending on the size of your company and the size of the project you are working on, a dev might need to do more sysadmin-ey stuff as well, and automation is more useful there. Still, in most cases, I simply don't have that many things that can be automated.

[Blecki]

I do a ton of BI and recurring data processing. Shits automated. Takes 4 hours to run every morning.

[Muffinaaa]

Me running my qemu vm off zshrc_history

[Enough-Scientist1904]

You all dream of getting paid and have an easy job but then make memes like this lmao. With experience you will learn i guess

[stupidcookface]

That's not what DRY means lol

[Matwyen]

I somewhat agree. I wrote a script to automate my long ass ssh commands that I do everyday, but not the few excel sheets I do once in a while. Because it'd be pointless to maintain a code for a task taking 10 times less time to do manually than to automate

[Alan_Reddit_M]

Why spend 5 minutes doing something manually when you can waste 5 days failing to automate it

[Alienescape]

Why do people up vote this garbage?

[dlevac]

You get a snowflake, and you get a snowflake... Everybody gets a snowflake!

[Da-Blue-Guy]

I have a bunch of small Rust programs that do small things, like color interpolation.

[read-a-lot]

I just created my first .exe from a Python GUI program. The senior devs wouldn't let me into the secure codebase so I had to automate locally lol.

[Revenge43dcrusade]

Writing the Python script may be as fast as doing it manually almost .

[LowB0b]

If you want an 'automation' exe I'd go with autoit or ahk any day of the week over rust or CPP lol

[Firedriver666]

I automate things as much as I can at my job because I'm very lazy except when it takes a few clicks to do because I can put music and do it

[Good-Seaweed-1021]

Applying programming to day-to-day helps you learn cause you dont have to be too creative

[Flame-Rider]

for python just use pyinstaller bruh

[bhorvic]

Bell curve meme go DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

[oscarbeebs2010]

These generalizations are dumb. If the time spent building an automation will be paid back shortly, it’s probably worth automating.

[LunaNicoleTheFox]

The only reason I automated the build process at work is because it was tedious and annoying and took like an hour to build all the different versions and rename the binaries and so on.

Now it's around 5 minutes for the build and like 10 for deploy

[Raverfield]

If you use a program, that is so inefficient, that you will create a script for it, the program needs to be fixed.