There once was a build engineer who lived in the shell and wrote such glorious scripts as the one that runs on a cronjob and texts his wife a random “sorry I’m late” excuse if it detects an active SSH session with his login after 9pm, or the one that scans his inbox for emails from a particular client with words like “help” and “sorry” and automatically connects to that client’s server to roll back the most recent changes. His legendary life hacks inspired me to become the DevOps Engineer and bash scripting enthusiast I am today.
SOCi CEO Alo Sarv once said, “We came into this space because we love solving complex problems.” But sometimes, we find ourselves obligated to devote time and brain space to unexciting, repetitive tasks instead. The best thing about scripting is that everything we don’t want to do becomes an opportunity to do something we love doing! For example, math is my least favorite part of any day, but while on Tech Support I often found myself needing to convert timestamps in the database from UTC to region-specific time zones. After the hundredth time I lost the tab where I had a browser-based converter open, I spent a weekend writing my own CLI tool - and learning about Daylight Savings Time in countries around the world.
Script walkthrough and demo:
dailydigest.sh - This script lays out the main points and important notices of my day, including meetings from Google Calendar, Jira tickets in progress, database cluster resource usage, and security signals from Datadog so that I can quickly and easily orient myself at the start of each workday.
imhungry.sh - This script uses lists of meals and attributes to make meal recommendations appropriate for the time of day. Arguments accepted include "now", which recommends quick and easy meals, and "lazy", which uses the Google Maps API to find close takeout restaurants for those days when you really don't feel like cooking. When no argument is provided, the script accepts user input to help you answer the age-old question: What do you feel like for lunch?
