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Thinking Before Coding

The most valuable habit in this whole course: plan first, then automate.

Coding without thinking causes bugs, and bad automation breaks in production. Before you open your editor, answer four questions.

The four questions

Pick any script you've written (or want to write) and write down:

  1. What problem am I solving?
    • One or two sentences. If you can't state the problem, you're not ready to code.
  2. What input does it need?
    • A file path? User input? An API response? AWS credentials?
  3. What output should it give?
    • Terminal text? A JSON file? An HTTP response? An exit code?
  4. What are the main steps?
    • The rough algorithm, in bullet points — read, process, report.

Example: the log analyzer

  • Problem: Manually scanning logs for errors is slow.
  • Input: A path to a .log file.
  • Output: Counts of INFO / WARNING / ERROR, printed and saved as JSON.
  • Steps:
    1. Read the file line by line.
    2. For each line, check which level it contains.
    3. Increment a counter per level.
    4. Print the summary and write it to a file.

That four-line plan is enough to write the code confidently — and to explain it to a teammate before a single line exists.

Why it matters

In real DevOps work, scripts run in production, failures are common, and other people read and modify your code. A clear plan makes your automation easier to debug, easier to maintain, and safer to run.

Try it: before your next script, write a short design.md answering the four questions. It takes five minutes and saves hours.