Monitoring Scripts

There is a lot of value in automation and providing software developers with scripts that can perform common tasks. To get good adoption and awareness of a suite of scripts, it is very important to provide a nice user experience. Just like in frontend, there’s a lot to be said for making things consistent. Little things, like using flags in a manner that is consistent with other command line interfaces matter quite a lot. For example, -v should usually mean the same thing as --verbose. Consistency within a suite of scripts is also important, because it empowers the user – by learning how a feature works in one script, they can transfer that knowledge and reuse it in a different context or script.

In the web team we have a suite of scripts, that we call the b-scripts. This is a collection of scripts that automate some common tasks. Because of our faith in automation, this collection of scripts keeps growing over time and we thought it would be fun to review some of them. We can already reveal that the most difficult part of any of the scripts has been to setup good auto-completion, but it has been well worth the effort. All of our scripts are sub commands to the b command. The b command sets up some environment variables, metrics support, help, and auto-completion for the other commands.