Why Automating Everything Adds to Your Toil
summary
Claim: blanket automation increases long‑term toil because scripts rot, dependencies change (ServiceNow, EU cloud rules, OS upgrades) and duplicated tools pile up. Concrete fixes: treat automation as software—unit tests, CI/CD, REST APIs and maintenance APIs—make tooling self‑service via Slack, log actions into change requests for audit, shard services for zero‑downtime deploys. Built examples: a Slack bot Igor (reboot/reload/reprovision) replaced by a RESTful, sharded Garena that records audits and reduces manual follow‑ups.
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chapters (34)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:30Definitions
- 3:51What is Toil
- 4:57What is Automation
- 7:18Automation Reduces the Toil
- 8:10Automation Adds to the Toil
- 9:08Dependencies
- 10:00Requirements Change
- 10:56Rotation System
- 11:26Production Systems
- 12:15Languages Change
- 12:42Unused Automation
- 13:26More than one way
- 14:08Too many tools
- 15:33System complexity
- 16:12Automation is good
- 16:36Automation is bad
- 17:18Solutions
- 17:34Minimize Potential
- 17:50Automation is Development
- 20:55Igor
- 21:45Big hammers
- 22:10Rebooting
- 25:08Trusting Eva
- 25:43Maximizing Usage
- 25:53Maximizing Minimize
- 27:02Promoting Automation
- 27:55Dealing with Rot
- 28:23Maximizing Effort
- 29:21Survival
- 30:11Final Message
- 30:47Garena
- 32:46Summary
- 34:26Questions
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