DonationCoder.com Software > The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006

When to automatize?how looking to optimize your system will make you inefficient

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lanux128:
we're tinkerers at heart, we'd be happy to go thru the instruction manuals for any gadgets and hope that it comes with loads of option so that we can modify it to our liking. in our spare time, we'll be googling for utilities that we'd would eventually *need*, if not now..

that's why we find ourselves in forums like this.. ;) anyway ending on a note of altruism, i think it's ok because what we find out will be useful to others.

TucknDar:
guilty as charged. 'nuff said  :-[

brownstudy:
I'll write a Word macro or Macro Express macro if I find myself doing the same thing repeatedly, but I tend not to put all that machinery in motion for a one-off document.

Thomas Limoncelli in his book "Time Management for System Administrators" has a great breakdown of when to automate:

You should do manually simple things done once.
You should automate hard things done once or simple things done often.
You shuld buy or write software or outsource for hard things done often.

Other ideas from his book on this topic:

* Repeatability means I can do something consistently many times (like configuring new machiens with the same software).
* Automation can replace the need to memorize something complicated that is done rarely. (like command-line options)
* Scalability. The process can work as the network grows.
* Automation can replace error-prone procedures (again, like command-line options).
He has a whole chapter on "How to automate" in his book. Good stuff.

app103:
hmmm...I don't think programmers are supposed to think like that...pasting something 75 times rather than coding a tool to do it this time...and every time...and for other people too.

If we all stopped coding the tools we want to use for the purpose of avoiding work, nothing would ever get done by anybody.

Necessity is the mother of invention...but laziness is its father.  ;)

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