When I started my on-call shifts, we had pretty little in the way of automation for day-to-day issues. Tasks like SSH’ing into our cluster, starting a Rails console, or doing a deep search through our gigantic mail directories, were either shelved away in someone’s bashrc, history log, or just ingrained into someone’s memory. This pain was also felt by a few other of my fellow programmers, and we started cobbling together a Git repo simply named ”37s shell scripts”.
This repo started very innocently: a little Ruby script named console that mapped a product name (basecamp) to a server name inside of our cluster (jobs-03), SSH’d in, and then ran a production Rails console. Several more bash and Ruby scripts started to trickle in as we started to share more of our personal code that we used when on-call. Eventually Sam laid down a foundation of bash scripts and directories borrowed from rbenv, and dubbed it ”37”.
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