Over the years, I have written lots of scripts to help automate something or other. Many of these have broken. Example of the scripts that have broken include a LastPass data exporter and encrypter in Ruby, Emacs Lisp of various kinds that integrate Emacs with other processes, a tiny script to toggle my Heroku authentication between my personal and work accounts, and others. Typically, I find this out about their brokenness at the worst possible time – when I need to actually use the scripts I rely upon.

This has become common enough that I have grown to expect it. Lots of things might cause one of these scripts to break: software upgrades, making incompatible changes to other pieces of code, accidentally removing something that the script relied upon have all played a part in things breaking.

I really hate this. Taking the time to write something, only to have it be broken when you need it, makes you feel like you wasted your time writing the scripts in the first place. Because of this phenomenon, I tend to write fewer scripts and be more accepting of discomfort.

I really hate this, too. I believe we should script things. I believe this is a key to being a productive programmer, and is one way that allows us to multiply out abilities as programmers. And, I'm not alone in thinking this way. It seems that all the best developers think the same thing: laziness is a virtue. Script away the things you would otherwise have to do manually.

I've come to believe that an automated setup & configuration management system is the key for me to solve these problems. If I could safely reproduce the environment wherein my software works, and I had tests around the software, then I could write scripts more effectively and with greater freedom. I would be able to get back some of the effectiveness I am missing out on.

Over the past year or so I have been making a concerted effort to solve this problem. Some things have worked out really well, others have not. At some point, the software to build this site was broken, and I didn't know why, and out of frustration I stopped writing and focused intensely on setting things up correctly from first principles. I'm nowhere near done, but it is time to start talking about what I have discovered.