2024-07-29/01: add "Quick bits: why you should automate everything"

2024-07-29/01-quick-bits-why-you-should-automate-everything.md

@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+# Quick bits: why you should automate everything
+
+If everything works as expected this blog post should appear in [in my
+blog](https://kokada.capivaras.dev/) without I ever touching the
+<capivaras.dev> website. I rewrote my [previous Python
+script](https://kokada.capivaras.dev/blog/using-github-as-a-bad-blog-platform/)
+to Go
+([permalink](https://github.com/thiagokokada/blog/blob/3c39e0f7cd58b1af885f69871490b05bf6fc7d99/blog.go))
+since my attempt to generate proper description to the RSS feed resulted in
+slow startup times (not because of Python, but because of my usage of
+`nix-shell` since I didn't want to deal with
+[venv](https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html) or anything to manage my
+Python dependencies).
+
+My previous workflow of this blog already involved me writing the texts in
+[neovim](https://neovim.io/), copying and pasting the result in the
+<capivaras.dev> website and publishing. This was not that bad, except that it
+seems I have a heavy tendency of editing my posts multiple times. Copying and
+pasting data between neovim and the website became tedious, so I decided to
+give up and automate the whole process.
+
+[Mataroa](https://mataroa.blog/) (the blog platform <capivaras.dev> run) has a
+reasonable good [API](https://mataroa.blog/api/docs/), and it only took a few
+hours to get a version of publishing working (it would take less if
+[Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/), the framework Mataroa is written, did
+not have a weird behavior with URLs missing a trailing `/`). An additional few
+lines of
+[YAML](https://github.com/thiagokokada/blog/blob/51b20612335c7f4312a51a0f436235b4b701ce8b/.github/workflows/go.yml)
+to make GitHub Actions trigger a pipeline and now I should never have to
+manually update my blog again.
+
+I could have not done this. I mean, I probably wasted more time writing an
+automation than I actually wasted publishing manually. But the manual process
+is easy to miss, and I already did multiple mistakes publishing in the manual
+method. For example, when writing the Markdown files, each post is written in a
+particular format, where the first header is considered the title, so I need to
+remove it from the contents during publication. But of course, this is easy to
+miss, and I had to fix this multiple times already.
+
+So yes, I think this is a good lesson on why you should automate everything. It
+is more than just about [time savings](https://xkcd.com/1205/), it is about
+reducing mistakes and even documenting (even if poorly) a process. I mean, the
+code I wrote is not that great, but I can definitely rely on it in the future
+to remember what I need to do. It will be much faster than trying to learn from
+scratch again.

Makefile

@@ -16,6 +16,10 @@ rss.xml: blog $(MARKDOWN)
 publish: blog
 	./blog -publish
 
+.PHONY: today
+today:
+	mkdir $(shell date '+%Y-%m-%d')
+
 .PHONY: clean
 clean:
 	rm -rf blog