Automating the Boring Stuff in Support

One of the things I love about support engineering is that you can automate away the tedious bits. Here’s a small example — a script I wrote to quickly pull customer info from our API:

async function getCustomer(id: string) {
  const res = await fetch(`/api/customers/${id}`);
  const data = await res.json();
  return {
    name: data.name,
    plan: data.subscription.plan,
    status: data.subscription.status,
  };
}

It’s nothing fancy, but it saves me from clicking through three dashboards every time I pick up a ticket.

I also keep a little helper for formatting log timestamps, because our system spits them out in epoch milliseconds and my brain doesn’t think in Unix time:

const formatLogTime = (epoch: number): string => {
  return new Date(epoch).toLocaleString("en-GB", {
    hour: "2-digit",
    minute: "2-digit",
    second: "2-digit",
    day: "numeric",
    month: "short",
  });
};

// usage
formatLogTime(1709654400000);
// => "5 Mar, 14:00:00"

The point isn’t to build a whole platform. It’s to shave off the small friction points that add up over a day of handling 30+ tickets. Even an inline JSON.parse(atob(token.split(".")[1])) to decode a JWT saves a trip to jwt.io.

My advice: keep a personal snippets file. Every time you do something repetitive, write a tiny function for it. After a few months, you’ll have your own little toolkit that makes you significantly faster.