Automation Principles

The principles and definitions of automation/programming is something that I am personally fairly passionate about. This is largely because I have spent so much time doing things the hard way without even knowing about it. Lacking peer review, and left to my own devices I was only ever building a solution to solve the current problem, never building a structure that could be built upon. Learning these concepts fundamentally changed the way I think and program.

I have covered these topics at Packet Pushers, Interop, and anyone who is willing to listen or unfortunately stuck listening to me pontificate verbally. The intention of this post is to announce our intention to create the content released semi-regularly, and aggregate the links to the respective blogs as they are built out.

Principles

You may note that these are not all strict principles…. well, you would be right, but they follow the spirit of what is intended here, which is provide the reader with context to avoid making mistakes.

• Atomicity
• Declarative/Imperative
• Data Normalization
• Data Modeling
• DRY (Do not Repeat Yourself)
• Inheritance
• Idempotent
• Mutable vs Immutable
• Principle of least astonishment
• Robustness Principle
• The Mythical Man-Month
• YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It) / Premature Optimization

-Ken