Automating The World

Tuesday 5 January 2016 at 08:30 GMT

It's official. I'm going to automate everything.

One bit at a time.

I'm currently available for work in London or remotely, automating everything and teaching others how to do the same. Allow me to explain.

(Or, if you're impatient, get in touch immediately.)

Automating Data Transformation

Getting data into and out of systems is hard work. People are expensive, software is buggy and the data is usually incomplete and corrupted in some way. Software engineers hate broken data.

I love it. Let me at your dodgy data.

Automating Testing

Maybe you have unit tests, maybe you don't. Nevertheless, your QAs are working round the clock to figure out what's wrong with your software, and by the time they find out what's wrong, you've already shipped.

Let's turn that on its head. Write the tests first, and set up quick feedback cycles so that developers know as soon as they've broken anything, before they have time to commit.

I can help get your tests in place, build the feedback infrastructure, and train your developers and QAs on how to do the same.

Automating Requirements

You're building the software right, but it's not the right software. You have too many features, or too few, or perhaps both at once as far as your customer feedback is concerned. Everything does its job, but your customers are still having to jump through a few too many hoops to get the tasks they want done.

By automating the business requirements, not the technical details, specifying the real demands of your customers in such a way that it's constantly being validated by software, I can help you build something that doesn't just tick the box, but that your customers love.

Automating Deployment

Your software works… on your developer machines. Getting it to production takes five days, four hundred emails, three people, two all-nighters and a partridge in a pear tree. All for a process that really should be the same every time.

Fortunately, there's a better way. I can help your team make deployment a one-click affair, automating the whole process. And when you're super-confident that it always works, we can take away the click and just let the fully-tested commits flow into production.

Automating The Boring Bits

Every team has little jobs to do alongside the normal work. The sort of thing that needs doing every few weeks or so, usually when something breaks. Analysing the website events to figure out what the most popular product is this month, creating a new deployable, upgrading the third-party dependencies… you name it. The trouble is, there's usually only one person that can do the job, because no one else knows how, and even then it's done so infrequently that they've forgotten too.

Boring, repetitive work isn't for humans, it's for computers. Let's automate it and get it out of the way, allowing your team to focus on the things that matter. I can teach them simple scripting and build tool automation to get this stuff done fast and iterate on it as necessary, even upscaling them to fully-fledged applications when the need arises.

Automating Performance Analysis

Everything does its job… kinda. Your customers are complaining. Web pages take ten seconds or more to load. The nightly jobs aren't done by the morning. Hitting the Generate Report button makes the browser wait for minutes before it's ready.

You can guess where the problems are, or you can measure it and solve it for good. I can help.

If you need something automated, or your team needs help learning how to do it for themselves, let me know. You can email me at samir@noodlesandwich.com, or check out my website for more details.