I originally created this blog as a way to document my career-work. I have a real passion for what I do and I truly enjoy sitting down and looking for refinements in an existing system or process. Still, my personal passion is not my career. I draw a clear line between my personal interests and the work I do to pay the bills. I know that doesn’t work for all people. We’re told to follow our passions and I do but just not through my 9-5 type work.

Still, I haven’t written about my work in a long time, so here’s my attempt to lay out some of the projects I’ll be working on and documenting next year.

1. Automate the deployment of all our internal applications. Currently our internal tools are upgraded manually and approximately every six months. I’d like to be able to do that on a regular basis and have it be touchless. I’ve already laid the groundwork, demoed it to my team, and I’m over 50% complete.
2. Create a SSP for common requests we currently handle. There’s a lot of work that’s simple and repetitive for us (like creating repos, build configurations, user provisioning) that we’d be better off not dealing with. I propose a self service portal for teams to use to get these things done faster and without us being directly involved with each request.
3. Automate all of our release procedures. We do some work, like release branching andcertain packaging tasks, manually today. I’ve already automated a lot of this but it needs to be rolled out fully so some of our tasks become virtually touchless.
4. Completely automate provisioning of our build infrastructure and expose the provisioning scripts to engineering so they can review, propose changes, or even make those changes themselves.

So yeah, I think the theme of 2018 is automation and standardization. It’s gonna be a good year, just gonna send it.