I’ve mentioned Howard Abrams’ posts on Literate DevOps before. I think of it as a sort of reproducible research where you record the steps you use to create a deployment image including the code for each step. Abrams does this using Org mode and Babel so that he can execute the code directly from his Org file. This makes it easy to share his results with colleagues, reproduce an image for testing, or even just remember how he did it.
At the EmacsConf 2015, Abrams gave a talk on the subject and subsequently made a video recreating his talk. It’s a really interesting talk that has ideas applicable to anyone who might need to share or recreate a complicated task. That’s almost all of us. How many times have you figured out how to perform some non-trivial process, needed to do it again later, and couldn’t remember exactly how you did it? It happens to me all the time.
Using Abrams’ techniques you write a story about what you’re doing and why and you put the necessary code right in the document and execute it from there. Then if you later need to do it again or if someone asks you how to do it, you have a file with all the steps and code. Abrams shows how to execute the code on remote machines and even how to execute the code on a machine protected by a firewall.
It’s a great video and everyone can probably learn some ideas from it. It’s about 28 and a half minutes so you’ll need to schedule a bit of viewing time.