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... is an edit button.

Building automated workflows is time-consuming work. The thinking is that if you do the hard labor up front, then you will never have to do rote tasks again.

The unfortunate reality is that automated workflows often break, and what you're left with is even more work than the amount you started with.

The common adage of automations is "set and forget", which in reality is a sure-fire way to incur technical debt. It is not the automations themselves that are a source of debt, but it is the challenge to maintain them, and the frustration when they stop working the way you initially intended them to.

Automations succeed when you create systems that allow for refactoring code as quickly as possible.

A good analogy would be keeping your office's cleaning supplies in a 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 this in action, join our Discord and explore how we implement edit buttons in our automations.