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Building Tools for Personal Productivity
Peter Bowen wrote about system administration and procrastination. His particular problem was with Nagios, but we’ve all been there from time to time. When I became Executive Producer of IT Conversations I tried to spend the time necessary to build tools to help me automate the work wherever possible.
For example, the newsletter that goes out each week is mostly generated from RSS feeds using a MovableType template and then has the ratings integrated using a Perl script. Took me an hour or two to put together but it saves me precious minutes each week when I create the newsletter.
As programmers, we ought to be tool builders. Anytime you find yourself doing something more than once, build a tool. Doing so pays big dividends in increasing personal productivity.
Posted by windley on July 12, 2006 11:55 AM
Comment from Dave Kinsella at July 13, 2006 3:59 AM
I couldn't agree more, I've been doing this for a number of years. A good example is a corporate intranet that I used to develop and manage.
A request for a new area in the intranet would be formatted in such a way that I could review the details and then click a button. The system would set up the area, apply relevant security, install content management tools and email all of the required details and documentation to the requestor.
This was a process that after much practice, still took at least thirty minutes before automating it so reducing it to a single click was a big time saving for me.
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