blog

... is an edit button.

Some people believe that building automated workflows is a better use of their time than doing the rote work that the automation is meant to fix. The thinking is, you put in some up-front hard work, and the payoff is more free time in the future. Even more people believe that automations tend to stagnate and get worse over time before they break, and are a sure-fire way to give future-you a terrible headache.

It is not the automations themselves that are a source of stress, but it is the challenge to maintain them, and the frustration when they stop working the way you initially intended them to. If you’re not careful, every automation you ship for your company becomes technical debt. Automations succeed when you create systems that allow for refactoring code as quickly as you made them in the first place.

A good analogy would be keeping your office's cleaning supplies in an publicly-known, and easy-to-access location. An office is likely to be clean if the requisite tools to maintain it are close at hand. If the space gets dirty, and no one knows where the cleaning supplies are, or if they're kept in a locked cabinet where only one person has the key, no one is going to feel a sense of ownership over the cleanliness of the office. Alternatively, if the supplies are always kept out in the open, it invites a sense of ownership across all individuals to help maintain the space.

One such way of creating these types of refactoring-systems is with an edit button (Check out the "view source" button at the top of this page!). At Val Town, within every automation artifact we create, we always include an edit button that links directly to the code that runs the automation. That way, if anyone on our team sees something wrong, they can immediately navigate to the project repo and make the necessary refactor.

When it comes to maintaining automations, the goal is to reduce the cost of editing the code to the point where it is so low you can make the improvement and move on with your day. If you're curious to see more examples of how we use edit buttons, there are many examples on our Discord!