I was going to hop in and say I keep a pad of paper where I just list out any process that I find myself doing rote, finding myself doing more than once, etc. A lot of it ends up being really simple. A six line bash script that concatenates my shopping lists from three text files when I am going to the store. A little python script that walks through a list of domain names, calls dig and dumps the output into a log file. I try to spend my computing time just thinking about how I can get more done with less keystrokes.

I'm around seven years into my career and only now do I feel comfortable with the idea of contributing to an open source project. You need to first work on a team whose workflow is structured in the manner that these projects work in (small, single purpose commits, reviews, etc.) and if that's not habituated, then simply figuring out how to do that first is a mountain in itself.

Sometimes, the bigger challenge with automation is getting users to see a service, function, or utility as the underlying algorithms and calls, and not as this immutable black box interface. Once viewed this way, it's easier to separate automation into more easily defined goals.

---

Foreach ($nonpayer in (Import-CSV ("C:\billing\" + (get-date -F MM) + ".CSV") | where {$_.pmt -eq 0})) { Send-MailMessage -from Billing@example.com -to $nonpayer.email -SMTPserver relay.example.com -title " Payment Overdue" -body "Hello $($nonpayer.first-name), your payment for $(get-date -f MMMM) was not received. Please send payment today."};

(I wrote this on the bus on my phone)

Besides, it's rare for DNS names to change; the point of DNS is the underlying server addresses can change without changing the name. And a service like SMTP relay should be less likely to change than other types of host.

But still, good point. This could easily be a Param if the function would be used in many environments.

PS C:\> New-Parameter SMTPSvr -TopHeader -BottomHeader -ParameterType string -DefaultValue "mail.example.com"

        Param(

                [string]$SMTPSvr = "mail.example.com"

        ) #end Param

It's incredible that we have highly skilled (and in demand) people who would like to work for free, and the problem is finding ways of letting them do that.

[1]https://medium.com/@hu_me/how-i-got-past-trying-to-reinvent-...