There’s been a bunch of info in the past few emails. Taking all that in can be difficult. Let’s recap: There are 3 major components of automating your infrastructure to get back to what you really love doing: Infrastructure as Code CI/CD Immutable Infrastructure Infrastructure as Code lets you avoid clicking around in a GUI every time you want to spin up a new resource. CI/CD makes your builds and deployments more repeatable and automatic.

Resistance to change is literally built into us. It’s not an exaggeration to say that most of your body’s systems are designed to keep things the same as much as possible. This process is called homeostasis, and it’s the reason you don’t fall over into a diabetic coma after eating a large meal, or drop dead from hypothermia during winter. Your body is constantly fighting against change, trying to keep things the same.

I love to build things. Software, training courses, woodworking, or emails, it doesn’t matter. Building things is absolutely wonderful. You know what’s not wonderful? Having to build the same thing over and over again. It ruins the experience, because you’re no longer creating and pouring your heart and soul into it. You’re just burning time on make-work. It’s no different with software. CI/CD Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is a pair of closely-related principles that have gotten intense traction over the past decade, and for good reason.

Everybody uses the GUI. There’s nothing wrong with this. The GUI can be a very clean and intuitive way to interact with a piece of software. But there’s a price. GUIs are terrible for automation. If you’ve ever wanted to automate some Windows program, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s simply no good way to do it, and all the solutions available put you at the mercy of minor display changes in the GUI.

One of my most-repeated mantras is, “If it can be automated, it should be.” I firmly believe that this is the path to improving the world. Nobody should be doing work that can be automated. If a machine can do it, that frees up time for a thinking human mind to do something more valuable. That sounds great, of course, and most of us would agree to it in principle.

TLDR: Get yourself a ticketing system if you don’t already have one, and use it to manage and document your tasks. All of them, no exceptions. When I got my first post-college job as a software developer, it was with a Managed Services Provider (MSP). For those of you not in the know, MSPs are effectively outsourced IT for organizations that can’t or don’t want to maintain an internal IT staff of their own.