During the 2020-2021 school year, I participated in the CyberTitan cybersecurity competition!
The non-final rounds are guaranteed have a set of formulaic tasks (update users/user permissions, install packages, etc.). So why not automate the formulaic ones? Turns out this is in fact allowed, so long as we write the scripts ourselves.
After being bootstrapped, the script setup the server according to a manually configured config.yml file, making sure to log each action in (which became critical when errors occurred).
Thanks in part to these scripts, along with our general excellence, our team Premature Optimization achieved second place in the finals!