#13 Automated builds are a must

I have a number of projects I work on. Some are open source, some are work-related, some are .NET, some are on Azure some are built in Node.js, some even on Ruby! I don’t work on all of them full-time. But once in a while I need to get back to something I worked with last time three months ago.

What all these projects have in common that I don’t need to worry about deployment. For the majority of them I even no longer know all the intricacies and settings of a release even though I have set it up in the past myself! I have automated deployment, where all I need to do is either just push my changes or press a button. That’s it.

No matter when I worked with the particular project the last time, I can deploy with confidence, every single time. It saves me stress and it saves me time.

Yes, there is an upfront cost of setting up automated builds and deployments. But it’s nowhere near as high as the price you pay for being called as the only person who knows how to build or ship something, not to mention the stress of missing a step.

Automated builds are no longer a luxury. We have great tools available like Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions. Setting up builds and releases is no longer a matter of ‘if’. It’s a matter of when.

What are you going to automate next?

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash