Automated Scripting - Take Back Your Time

I've recently focused a lot of my efforts on automation. Humans are naturally prone to introduce errors into whatever they do - this can be disastrous when we are talking about the uptime of production systems and uniform technical details playing vital roles in today’s technological landscape, not to mention time consuming not only setting up a project, but troubleshooting when it goes wrong. For this reason, I've spent a lot of time scripting.

Scripting is the act of making a computer do all the manual labor instead of a human. There are various monotonous things that an IT professional or developer must do in a day or week. You can imagine that doing so days and weeks over and over can lead to laziness. Scripting takes this possibility away completely. The beauty of a machine over a human is that it thinks in binary, 0's and 1's. Machines only do what they are told to do - exactly how they are told to do it. If you can build out a script that works exactly how you want, as long as the external variables remain the same each time, you'll get the same result each time. This is a beautiful thing when setting up new users, deploying servers, installing software, or running scheduled tasks - let the machine do it for you!

I've developed a few projects that take advantage of scripting which I'll link below. They are open source so anyone can take advantage of them. I'm a true believer of scripting and automation. My philosophy is if you do it more than a couple times and the likelihood of you needing to do it again are high, you should automate it. This reduces the potential for errors, creates a consistent schedule and set of instructions that can be followed to a tee in the future. Spending the necessary time upfront to setup an automated way to do a repetitive task will save you hours of time later. Plus, once you aren't spending your precious time doing menial tasks, you can instead spend your time doing what matters - thinking of great solutions to technical projects.

My Automation Projects

• Mac Scripting: A collection of macOS scripts to deploy new machines and admin a fleet of Macs.
• Git Create: Create git repos with a single command.
• Brew Update: A simple script to automate updating Brew apps on macOS.
• Github Archive: Backup your Github instance or pull down all of your projects at once.
• Secure Browser Kiosk: Creates a secure browser kiosk for macOS.