I can do anything. I can’t do everything. –Me

Anything worth doing is worth doing in a way you can check in to git. To recall what I did from the command line, I should turn those actions into a persist-able document. Do I? Not often enough. Often I rely on bash history to remind me of what I did last time. Since the machines I work on are out of a global pool, I have been burned by not recording commands before relinquishing a machine.

For complex series of tasks, it makes sense to execute a bash script to perform those tasks, and I have many of these. Shell scripting excels in doing command line tasks. Where it does not do so well is on tasks that are split over multiple machines. While curl is great for pulling and pushing files to webservers, the majority of my remote work requires ssh and scp to set things up. This is where Ansible comes in: If I can make a playbook that records the commands I use to perform that action, I can repeat it on another machine.

Here is what my workflow looks like as I try to get better at it:

“Let the complexity emerge.” Probably the best advice I ever got in coding. Do something in as straight-forward manner as possible. When you find your self repeating code, extract it. Here’s an example from an ansible playbook I’m working on.