## Kevin and addcustomer In 1995 Jacob worked at a BSDi-based ISP. The manual "New Account Sign Up Process" (taped to the desk hutch) couldn't keep up with explosive demand — operators re-entered customer data three times, with high error rates and customers lost on hold. Head sysadmin "Kevin" wrote a Vim script, `addcustomer`, collapsing the process to a single step: enter the info, confirm, done. ## Three Lessons - **Having a process was good** — it let them cope with the influx and gave Kevin the road map to write the automation. Process precedes automation. - **Every manual step was a potential source of misfortune** — one mistake throws the whole thing off. - **Being the person who could write the script made you awesome** — automation is leverage. ## The Principle "System automation is configuration management policy made into code." You can't automate a process you haven't first articulated as policy — the human story behind [[Configuration Management Is Policy-Driven]], and the manual-toil problem that [[IaC vs Task-Based Scripting]] formalizes.