Mutually Assured Destruction

Automation is great and wonderful and everything, but it does provide ample opportunity to do damage quickly. Great power, great responsibility and all that.

Over the weekend I was working on a Python library to interact with an internal ticketing system. I was adding the capability to generate a bunch of tickets at once, and wasn’t paying attention to the folder I was pointed at. Let’s just say I heard from multiple folks first thing Monday morning about the 50+ emails in their inboxes notifying them of new issues that needed their attention. Whoops!

Lesson learned: double-check your inputs when writing automation scripts. Also own up to your mistakes, better to apologize fast than lead with an excuse.