Do Things Manually Before Automating Them#
Application Design#
When designing new applications it is common to start with a UI draft and develop the app later based on those workflows.
We take this approach even further. First, we draft UIs on paper (aka. dead-tree-format) and run use-cases repeatedly by writing them out by hand.
This is painfully hard work, but it inherently leads to more minimalistic user interfaces with the least amount of clutter and changes per step possible.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it:
In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
Workflows#
Never automate anything you only do once-ish in a year. Automation always comes with a cost and the
Reasons to automate#
We are humans and thus make mistakes. Computers are way better at doing repetitive work consistently than we are. While we do not automate anything right away, we do begin scripting some parts of the things we do right away, for example sequential steps that are always the same. Those become our first sub-tasks / routines that later serve as the basis for further automation.
There is another reason to start automating things early in the lifetime of a workfow: If others can benefit from your work, then put in the effort to make the world a better place. That is how free software works. <3