Top all-time · #1271
Dan Slimmon
Personal blog · blog.danslimmon.comprogrammingsystems
Dan Slimmon's personal blog at blog.danslimmon.com covers programming and systems. Since 2018, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 84 times, most often “Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (24) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dan Slimmon's posts on operations and engineering practice: 'do-nothing scripting' for turning manual runbooks into scripts, queueing and utilisation, and false positives in detection.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 24 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Scientific incident response
Most-linked posts?
- Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)18 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2019-07-22
- Squeeze the hell out of the system you have6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-08-18
- The most important thing to understand about queues (2016)5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-03-08
- Car alarms and smoke alarms: the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-06-21
- Questions that will make you a rubber duck3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-18
- Troubleshooting on a Distributed Team Without Losing Common Ground3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-21
- No Observability Without Theory2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-25
- The Queueing Shell Game2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-25
- Garden-Path Incidents2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-18
- Is Ops a Bullshit Job?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-12
What Hacker News says?
I'm really confused by products like this and Warp Drive[0]. What does this add over a shell script? There is a response elsewhere in comments[1] which claims that this is trying to fix the problem of bad documentation, but this has the same fundamental problem. If you a) are responsible for fixing something, b) are unfamiliar with it, and c) the "fixing resources" - whether those are scripts, documentation, or a Ru…
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run”Submitted Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019) as a story · 804 points
HN discussionI think this might be the article you read: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “How to fuck up software releases”Submitted Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation as a story · 645 points
HN discussionThere is also a mathematical relationship in queuing theory between utilization and average queue length, which all programmers should be told: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2016/08/26/the-most-important-th... As you run close to 100% utilization, you also run close to infinity waiting times. You don't want that. It might be acceptable for your internal projects (the actual waiting time won't be infinity, and you'll c…
Comment linking /2016/08/26/the-most-important-thing-to-understand-about-queues/
on “Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper”Submitted Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019) as a story · 582 points
HN discussion> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083367 > > https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-... What is the point of defining a Python class with a single `run` method, and then running with `Class.run()`, instead of just defining a `function` and running with `function()`?
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “Automating processes with software is hard”Submitted The most important thing to understand about queues (2016) as a story · 218 points
HN discussionThe Do Nothing Scripting [1] is an approach that I feel recognizes the difficulty of automation by starting out with a script that just tells you what to do like a checklist. Once you've used it to fully document all the exceptions, etc. you can then start building the automation. An approach like this seems to give more weight to the fact that just figuring out a way to document exactly what needs to be done is oft…
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “Automating processes with software is hard”Submitted Dead Air on the Incident Call as a story · 132 points
HN discussionOr a do-nothing script if you don't want to automate it right away. https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “Duplicati: Free backup software to store encrypted backups online”Submitted I’ve made a conscious effort to stop apologizing for bugs in my code as a story · 130 points
HN discussionYep, I remember that post as well. Was described as "Do-nothing scripting" and I've applied the concept as well. Original Article: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495739
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “Simple product management tricks”Submitted Car alarms and smoke alarms: the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity as a story · 45 points
HN discussionI have a very similar setup but with HLedger[1]. A "do-nothing"[2] script helps me download statements by opening bank websites, waits for manual import and finally checks balances. That makes it a lot less repetitive and error prone. Or at least, I catch the errors faster. I've found HLedger and Shake to be fast enough to process almost a decade of finances. Dmitry Astapov has an extremely well produced tutorial wo…
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation
on “My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024)”Submitted When efficiency hurts more than it helps (2015) as a story · 33 points
HN discussion> CPU utilization - Ideally the CPU would be busy 100% of the time, so as to waste 0 CPU cycles. On a real system CPU usage should range from 40% ( lightly loaded ) to 90% ( heavily loaded. ) There was an article posted here a while back that challenged the notion that 100% utilization is a desirable goal: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2015/07/09/when-efficiency-hurts...
Comment linking /2015/07/09/when-efficiency-hurts-more-than-it-helps/
on “Operating Systems: CPU Scheduling”Submitted The Latency/Throughput Tradeoff: Why Fast Services Are Slow and Vice Versa as a story · 25 points
HN discussionThis is essentially Little's law. https://blog.danslimmon.com/2016/08/26/the-most-important-th...
Comment linking /2016/08/26/the-most-important-thing-to-understand-about-queues/
on “Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)”Submitted Is Ops a Bullshit Job? as a story · 22 points
HN discussionHurrah for do-nothing scripting[0]! [0] https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “Checklists are hard, but still a good thing”Submitted Big Problems and Small Problems under load as a story · 15 points
HN discussionA lot from Dan Slimmons, especially : https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/08/02/stop-apologizing-for-... https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-... or https://blog.danslimmon.com/2017/06/30/cap-your-ticket-backl...
Comment linking /2017/06/30/cap-your-ticket-backlog/
on “Ask HN: What are some blog posts that you have enjoyed going through?”Submitted Troubleshooting on a Distributed Team Without Losing Common Ground as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI'm basically of the same opinion as you, but recently read this article[0] on "do nothing" scripts and really like it. The idea is to write at your process _as a script_ that will at first just print what to do. Then you can use computer magic to improve things over time and automate steps in the middle. I generally agree that there are a lot of processes that are like "use your brain and think at this step", which…
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “Writing Runbook Documentation When You’re an SRE”Submitted Did u ever read so hard u accidentally wrote? as a story · 11 points
HN discussionA major tag in this guys set of blog posts is medical reasoning: https://blog.danslimmon.com/tag/medical-reasoning/ In that regulated field, a senior or principal engineer runs CAPA (corrective and preventative action) diagnostics and it sounds like the author has worked that way. Look for it on resumes.
Comment linking /tag/medical-reasoning/
on “Dead Air on the Incident Call”Submitted The Queueing Shell Game as a story · 11 points
HN discussionIt reminded me of a simple but not so obvious concept - do nothing scripts. https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...
Comment linking /2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/
on “Keep calm and use the runbook”Submitted Is your SRE monitoring like a car alarm or smoke alarm? as a story · 11 points
HN discussion
