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Weekly Reflection #34 - Automation and toil
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Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightI've been working with someone recently, migrating a manual, multi-step process out of Excel and into a Python workflow. It requires significant upfront work. You have to understand the task before you can automate it. But when you find the right solution, the whole thing runs without you. It's a thing of beauty. Effective automation drives the toil of a task toward zero. WisdomIf a human operator needs to touch your system during normal operations, you have a bug.
Carla Geisser, Site Reliability Engineering: Eliminating Toil
ReflectionWhat do you keep doing by hand and calling normal? Lagniappe
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Weekly Reflections Newsletter
Practical insights on platform engineering, developer experience, and building teams that ship. Each issue is written to be useful, actionable, and applicable. No filler, no promotions-only emails. Enter your email and sign up for free right now.
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight The T-shaped pattern has been around since the seventies. It argues for going deep in your craft while maintaining broad knowledge across others. World-class knowledge of monolithic SQL databases won't inherently make you good at distributed systems or React websites. Though being broadly familiar with patterns and technologies in other domains makes you a richer database expert....
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight It's well known in our industry that we should favor two-way doors, which are cheap to experiment with, over one-way doors that demand slow deliberation. While true, over time all that optionality can bite us when we try to undo several layers of two-way doors at once. Reversibility itself has a hidden cost. The best way to treat a two-way door is to reverse quickly when a choice...
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight At PlatformCon 2026, Kelsey Hightower gave a talk titled ZTA: Zero Token Architecture (a name he admits isn't really a thing, but it sort of is now, isn't it?). The whole idea comes down to: don't outsource your ability to think, just because these tools exist. One of his examples involves working with database tables. Someone teaches an AI agent to build one, then asks it to...