¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

When performing routine planned maintenance, one often needs to “take oncall”.

This is standard terminology; for the uninitiated, it can be more formally defined as “adding a schedule override to a given oncall shift”. The override is often brief (e.g. one hour), though it does not have to be.

Note that, in this definition, “taking oncall” is not the same as swapping a given oncall shift with a coworker.

Pedantries satisfied, now here we go:

Problem statement: make the action of taking oncall in JIRA Service Management (JSM) (neé OpsGenie) quick and efficient.

When using the web UI (https://{corp}.atlassian.net/jira/ops/who-is-on-call) it often takes me a significant amount of time¹ to remember how to do so.

A quicker way is to issue a command via Slack:

/jsmops assign oncall to me for TechOps

The command works as is: “me” is a magic word, and “TechOps” is the name of the oncall rotation.

But I cannot remember this command, no matter how often I run it. I can re-create it by running /jsmops help², reading the documentation and then crafting it. However, now a few wasted precious minutes were gone!

In order to streamline it in the future, I’ll use espanso to define this snippet (via espanso edit):

matches:
  - trigger: ":oncall"
    replace: "/jsmops assign oncall to me for TechOps"

From this point on, I just need to type :oncall<ENTER> on Slack. From O(minutes) to O(seconds)!

I should probably introduce some structured organization to my espanso snippets at some point. As they grow in quantity, it becomes more challenging to manage them. For example, I thought of arranging this one with :slack:oncall, but I don’t have any other Slack commands to justify that yet.