XKCD, Automation, and Timeboxing

I'm a huge fan of the web comic xkcd. The author's sense of humor meshes perfectly with my own, and I love the geeky/nerdy subject matter, although I'll admit there are times that I need to turn to ExplainXKCD for help. A comic of his that has stuck with me for a while now concerns automation:

Can you think of anything you do 50 times a day?

As I looked at this, I realized that I had spent more time automating different tasks (build scripts, log file checks, etc.) than I might have saved.

But at the same time, even if I didn't save time from the automation, what made it worthwhile was:<

1. The elimination of mundane tasks 
2. A reduction in errors caused by the manual execution of said mundane tasks

I was letting this idea germinate a bit, hopefully into a potential blog post, until I saw this comic about a week ago:

Check and mate.

Yep.

You'd think I would have added the satistfaction that one gets from completing a project to that list of what makes automation worthwhile. But as xkcd calls out, the reality is that many times these projects never complete as there is an endless loop of thinking and tweaking as you continuously improve it.

I'm even facing this now, in terms of an "alpha" release of a new version of an Excel-based scoping tool we use at work. I reached out to a few folks to be early testers to get feedback on the core changes, but that was weeks ago and the spreadsheet is still being used just by me as I endlessly tinker with it.

Time to embrace my inner-agile practitioner and enforce some discipline around timeboxing, I think.

My new home

I've had a couple homes on the web for a while now... there's my About Me, the old BasilHayek.com (below), my start at a data science blog, and the requisite social media sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest).

How did this not win a Webby?

This is an attempt to bring my scattered web presence together into something I can update a bit more often and traverse a broader range of topics on.

Giddyup.