How a Job as an Automation Engineer Has Changed Decisions I Make in My Personal Life

Early on in my network journey I was tasked with data mining and bulk configuration change tasks, which were quite common tasks at the NOC I was working at that time. These weren’t tasks I was terribly pleased with doing after the third or fourth time doing the same exact thing over and over again. Things started to evolve from there, simple formulas in spreadsheets to transform data to a Java app that helped with incident management. With each solution I conjured up, my job became less repetitive and my perception on any repetitive tasks changed. A few chapters later in my career I moved on from one of solutions to building automation at scale.

As any automation engineer will admit, the first step in automating a known workflow is thinking differently. This typically starts with evaluating current requirements; then reevaluating legacy requirements helps to shape the outcome. So many times have I spent weeks developing a solution only to find that requirement X exists because an engineer said or did something years ago, and no one has questioned whether this is still applicable. Once we’ve settled on what the new workflow will look like, the second part to thinking differently is focusing on trying to say yes, instead of how many reasons there may be to say no. A wireless engineer once told me it was impossible to have help desk troubleshoot a wireless connection via automation. After talking through the most common issues, I was able to create a playbook that was tied to a Slack chat command that covered the most common use case and prevented those tickets from making it to network ops.

These simple working practices have now influenced decisions in my personal life. Now, when selecting almost any non-trivial purchase my first thought is can I automate some portion or use technology to enrich my experience? I have always had the mentality to solve with technology first, but typically that has led to shortsighted purpose-driven purchases.

Aquarium

There is a running joke with my coworkers that I can’t write a blog post or do a presentation without making it about my aquarium at some point. To make sure I don’t disappoint, automation has been front-of-mind for so many purchases for my aquarium. This started with creating a controller based on a RaspberryPi and industrial sensors so that I could have better visibility into telemetry metrics, such as temperature and pH. After starting to collect data, I quickly found myself rethinking the equipment I had selected. This opened my eyes to the art of the possibility.

About six months after starting my first aquarium build (in many years), I started to dream of what is next. How can I take what I learned to make more informed decisions that make my life easier and make a better ecosystem for my pets? I went from having to manually top off fresh water, cleaning filters every few days, and manually adding chemicals to a mostly hands-off approach to managing my aquarium.

Things Improved with Automation

• Cleaning filter socks every few days -> Automated roller mat that changes the filter media based on an optical sensor and only requires once-a-month maintenance.
• Daily water top offs of ~1 gallon of fresh water -> Auto top off that uses a 10-gallon reservoir and optical sensor to ensure a more stable salinity.
• Telemetry statistics
  • Reagent-based tests taking roughly half an hour to complete in total, which led to never being done -> Some done every 2 minutes while others are done every 6 hours, and all are stored in a time-series database with Grafana for visualization.
  • Non-reagent test which takes seconds to perform BUT rarely did -> Just like reagent-based, performed every 2 minutes and sent to the same time-series database.
• Lighting was done with hard on/off timers which could be a harsh transition -> Lighting based on a ramp sunrise/sunset/moonlight cycle to help promote happy pets and coral growth.

Fireworks

Growing up in a small town, every year the Fourth of July was a big event for my family, and I was fascinated with setting off fireworks. As adults, my brother and I still have that childlike fascination. His yearly Fourth of July part started off with him manually setting up each firework one by one for the whole family to marvel at, but he wanted something more.

Our first automated firework display was roughly 15 minutes long and was done the old-fashioned way. In the weeks leading up to the party my brother had spent countless hours watching YouTube videos of the specific fireworks he purchased and researching exact run times of each. When the time came to build the display, we had four sheets of plywood where he had mapped out each firework and the exact length of time delay fuse that was needed to trigger each one without overlap. It was a masterpiece and had a single point of failure…. One fuse path, nothing had multiple paths or a concept of failure domain. By some miracle, the whole show went from start to finish without issue, and only one mortar failed to launch.

The next two years the display was driven by a remote firing system. This gave us the ability to stop mid-show, if needed (fire safety reasons were a concern), and we went from one failure domain to sixteen failure domains. Evolving the display was a big step forward to ensure success, plus it gave two adult “children” the ability to press buttons to blow things up, so it was a big win.

Home Automation

This mindset of automation-first has also influenced purchases of light switches, garage door openers, TVs, audio systems, and even Christmas lights. Small tasks of having schedules for exterior lights or skills with Amazon Alexa have improved the ecosystem that is my home. With simply telling Alexa It's bedtime all of my interior lights & TVs shutoff. This was a huge win living with someone who always forgets to turn things off.

The choice for an audio system was something I pondered for quite some time. Finding a single room/purpose solution was easy but the right whole home audio experience that integrated with other ecosystems I had was the more difficult task. AirPlay2 compatibility along with a built in multi-zone audio, multiple available form factors including indoor & outdoor solutions, and Amazon Alexa integration were the tech-related requirements. In the end, the most comprehensive product that also had great audio quality ended up being on the higher end of pricing, but having the complete end-to-end integration was a huge deciding factor.

My latest child-like obsession that has been influenced by automation has been my Christmas light display. This year is my second year of having a display driven via automation and choreographed to music. When I was a child there was one house that had a few props that would have sections that would blink to look like rotating tires on a truck or Santa’s waving at people as they passed by. This brought me so much joy and being able to build a display using a RaspberryPi, a soldering iron, and FM transmitter just to potentially bring others the same joy it brought me as a child is worth the expense.