Deno, a modern JS platform, worked well tonight as a scripting language and ecosystem for building a tiny cli interface for paging in teammates.

I will expand my use of it and replace usage of zx + js with vl + ts + Deno.

I prototyped the cli with a focus on reducing human cognitive overhead during stressful operations to provide sound defaults and reduced choice when choosing how many teammates to bring in, what to use as incident message, and details.

A few things made this easy:

1. Confidence in deploying this as a standalone tool thanks to Deno without dependency management issues
2. npx allowing for lazy loading of the pagerduty-cli tool to shell out to
3. vl as a deno library that emulates behavior from Google’s SRE tooling of zx. These are javascript libraries that make for convenient bash-like scripting in a js/ts environment.

Prototype script below: