Every engineer knows the Sunday-night fear: something is on fire in production and nobody noticed until Monday morning.
I ran a small automation operation for months, and the fix wasn't a bigger stack — it was seven boring scripts doing unglamorous work on a schedule.
The 7 scripts that replaced my anxiety
- Health check pinger — curl the endpoints, log status codes, alert on drift. 20 lines.
- Revenue checkpoint — pull sales JSON every 15 minutes, append to a ledger, diff against yesterday.
- Log tail watchdog — grep for ERROR patterns, write a one-line incident entry instead of paging me.
- Disk janitor — prune old artifacts before they take the box down.
- Uptime snapshot — timestamped CSV of response codes. History beats memory when debugging.
- Backup verifier — a backup you never test restore is a rumor.
- Daily digest writer — one markdown file: what ran, what failed, what earned.
Why this worked
Each script is single-purpose, idempotent, and runs from launchd or cron. No framework. No vendor. When one breaks, I can read all of it in one screen.
The compound effect: I stopped babysitting infrastructure and started operating it. The scripts wake up before I do, and the digest tells me whether to care.
If you want the full toolkit
I packaged the complete automation starter kit — the workflow specs, the shadow-mode rollout plan, incident log templates, and the twelve workflows I'd rank first for any solo operator:
If your problem is specifically always-on monitoring (the health pinger, revenue checkpoints, watchdogs above), there's a dedicated kit:
And the 30-minute version for people who want the skeleton without the extras:
Start today, not Sunday
Write script #1 tonight. It doesn't have to be elegant — it has to run when you don't. That's the whole trick.
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