Title: Scripting Hell: A Day in the Life of a Newfangled Ops Guy

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November 21, 2005. The day began like any other in my early days as an ops guy. I was still figuring out where scripting fit into the world of sysadmin work. My background wasn’t quite aligned with the new wave of automation tools and languages that were sweeping through tech—Perl scripts to manage servers, Python for DevOps magic, and bash to keep everything running smoothly.

I arrived at my desk, greeted by a stack of emails from various services that needed some love. One of them was particularly grumpy: “MySQL server is hitting 95% CPU usage on our development machines.” I rolled up my sleeves and pulled out an old friend—top—to get a quick look.

The culprit? A cron job running every minute, churning through the database with a script that, in its glory days of creation (circa 2003), had been written to run hourly. The developer’s intentions were good, but their timing was terrible. I spent an hour trying to figure out which part of the script was causing the slowdown—too many SELECT statements? Poor index usage? A combination of both?

By the time I had isolated the bad boy query and optimized it with a better index, the MySQL server seemed happy again. But there were more issues on my plate today.

Next up: setting up our new load balancer for a soon-to-be-launched web app. The team had settled on HAProxy, and while I was familiar enough with Nginx, this was my first time playing with HAProxy. It felt like the script was singing a siren song: “I know what you need; just follow me, and everything will be fine.” But as I started coding, it quickly became clear that something about this was a bit more complex than I had anticipated.

My attempts to get it working in bash were met with wall after wall of errors. The script needed to be smarter—smarter than the simple ping-based health checks everyone seemed to use. After a few hours of trying (and failing) to get everything right, I realized that while scripting was good for automation and glue code, it wasn’t going to cut it here.

So, I switched gears. Time to dig into Python. I wrote a small module to interface with the servers, gather more detailed metrics, and feed those back into HAProxy. It felt like progress—finally, something that actually worked! And, bonus: it was easier to maintain than bash ever could be for this task.

Later in the day, we had our weekly standup meeting with the developers. As I sat there, trying to keep up with their rapid-fire discussion of new features and bug fixes, I couldn’t help but think about how far ops has come. From the days when our only weapon was a vi buffer full of commands to manually patch servers, we now had tools that could do it automatically.

But as much as things have changed, there’s still an undercurrent of frustration. The sysadmin role is evolving, and with that comes a new set of challenges. We’re not just about fire-fighting anymore; we need to be part of the development process from the start. Automating our way out of some of these issues is great, but it also means we have to keep up with technology and learn new languages.

As I logged off for the night, my mind wandered back to the Python script that had finally taken over for bash. It was a small victory, but one that reminded me that scripting isn’t just about automation; it’s about writing code that can adapt and grow. And as we move into the next phase of DevOps, that’s exactly what we’ll need.

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That’s how my day went in 2005. Scripting hell, indeed!