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Cost-benefit analysis of the project:

All in all, I’m mostly satisified with the end result but I wish to improve on it even further in the upcoming weeks or months. It does the job well enough and I’m not complaining but I would have at least liked if I could find a way to add the dates to the markdown files sooner than later, but I’ll figure it out eventually. I spent a few days brainstorming to be able to think of a simple enough solution for the issue at hand and then a couple of hours to search for how GitHub Actions work exactly and how I’m supposed to implement them in my repo. Coding the python script didn’t take that long, all things considered. The whole approach didn’t actually take that long to accomplish if I compare it to the previously tried attempts or apporaches that I’ve taken, which is a good thing too! I’d reckon I took about 3 to 4 days to get the whole thing up and running from A to Z. As for the resources, I’d say the only resources I really exhausted throughout those couple of days are time, and my energy. It took me so long to actually settle on a process to follow through with and then learning how to do the whole thing was quite exhausting and tedious, at least at first because things got easier the more I searched and practiced. The whole thing was an exercise in patience more than anything else; everytime I made a step forward, something came up that made me go two steps backward! It really got on my nerves a lot of times, more than I could remember, and there are still some parts of the code that I would have preferred to do differently but I got to the end of the problem at the end so I should be proud of that fact.

Within the next 5 years, I cannot say for sure how much time and resources I’ll be saving with my automation exactly but I can already tell that despite its small scale, I’ve managed to get a lot off my shoulders through it. Saving and listing the exact last modified dates has helped me a lot with tracking when I last changed something, and even though GitHub has this feature already built-in it can be useful to know when the changes exactly happened by the minute and second too, something that GitHub doesn’t show by default, also showing the dates to whoever vists my blog is defintitely a good thing for them too. I’d say this automation saves me about 5 or 6 minutes every day I write an article/post on, and over time these couple of minutes that are saved will more likely end up becoming hours, days, probably even weeks as I start churning out more and more articles and posts. As for resources, I’ll end up saving my attention and energy to more important and worrying matters and things, and I’m sure as time goes on the benefits will only be more apparent to me. It’s also helped me practice coding in general and that’s definitely a plus too. In the end I think the resources and time I spent doing the whole thing and working hard on it were definitely well spent. The automation is also rather scalable and as such would also work well even with a lot of blog posts and whatnot provided that some bits and parts of the code are updated to accomodate for large amounts of posts.

As for whether it’s economically beneficial or not, I’d argue that it can be beneficial in the long term; the whole process took me a couple of days to visualize and develop and and then just a couple of hours to fully code the python parts, and in return it’ll help me save a quite a lot of time and energy over a long while, not to mention the potential improvements that can be thought of and applied to it mean that there’s always room for improvement, such as for example setting up code so that the last modification dates are then displayed in each of their respective markdown files for the viewer to check, or as another example making it so that posts that have been edited/modified relatively soon to each other are put and grouped together. The possibilites are endless and I truly believe that there’s some serious good use for the idea in the long-term, if everything is done properly to develop it.

At the end of the day, I think the labor I put into this automation project has definitely shown its fruits and it’s been an interesting project to work on. I think it’s bound to help me in more than one way in the foreseeble future and I can’t want to develop the idea even further.