Automation & Toil
Reducing manual, repetitive, automatable work — and the trap of automating something you do not understand, which scales mistakes faster than it scales work.
Repeated manual task, then understand, then standardise, then automate, then monitor the automation — in that order, because skipping a step moves the failure rather than removing it.
Do not automate what you do not understand. Bad automation does not make mistakes less likely — it makes them faster, wider and more confident.
Manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales with the service and leaves nothing behind — and the "scales with the service" part is what makes it toil rather than just work.
Six failure modes that scheduled work has and request handling does not: duplicate execution, missed execution, overlap, timezones, long-running jobs, and no observability at all.
Five questions that decide whether scheduled work survives real infrastructure: can it run twice, can it overlap, what if the machine dies, can it retry, is it idempotent.