Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

By William Ball

Concluding Challenge for an Automater—Explaining Value

You've become knowledgeable and experienced in scripting your computer so that it best serves you. You know how to improve your skills in script writing. You've practiced different approaches enough to know how to solve problems efficiently. The final challenge in your automation career is this: How do you explain how good you have become?

This is a serious problem, and, as usual, the solution begins with attitude. You no longer pound at the keyboard to bludgeon technical tasks into submission; you now operate in a more refined way and achieve correspondingly grander results. As an employee, you're much more valuable than the system administrators and programmers who reinvent wheels every day. In your recreational or personal use of Red Hat Linux, the computer is working for you—not the other way around, as it might have been when you started. Your attitude needs to adjust to the reality you've created by improving your productivity. Invest in yourself, whether by attending technical conferences where you can further promote your skills, negotiating a higher salary, or simply taking the time in your computer work to get things right. It's easy in organizations to give attention to crises and reward those visibly coping with emergencies. It takes true leadership to plan ahead, organize work so emergencies don't happen, and use techniques of automation to achieve predictable and manageable results on schedule.

One of the most effective tools you have in taking up this challenge is quantification. Keep simple records to demonstrate how much time you put into setting up backups before you learned about cron, or run a simple experiment to compare two ways of approaching an elementary database maintenance operation. Find out how much of your online time goes just to the login process and decide whether scripting that is justified. Chart a class of mistakes that you make and see whether your precision improves as you apply automation ideas.

In all cases, keep in mind that you are efficient, perhaps extraordinarily efficient, because of the knowledge you apply. Automation feels good!

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