The Successful Programmer’s Spreadsheet

Doing more with less is an important part of the value of software. We write software to enrich peoples lives and quite often that involves automation of annoying repetitive tasks. I am sure that quite a few business people would agree that they love their spreadsheets. Finance tools like spreadsheets liberate the business owner to do things like run their business.

Automation is key for the liberation of the successful software developer.

Free yourself up to do more important things like making better software. Take a look at your what you do on a regular basis. What could get automated? If you find yourself having done something twice and there is chance you’ll have to do it again. Stop! Automate it.

Success requires that you be lazy

The old saying is that the best programmer is a lazy one. What that is really saying is the best programmers only do something once or twice and then automate it. I don’t claim to be the best coder or even a great one but one thing that helps me look good is automation.

Here is what I have automated in my world:

• Running tests
• Building application releases
• Deploying software to QA
• Deploying documentation for new releases to our website.
• Deploying software ready for shipment

Things I would love to better automate in my world:

• Updating a project’s libraries to the newest version.
• Automating the setup of software downloads for our customers.
• Pushing “What’s New” content into documentation for maintenance releases.
• Integrating software downloads with our CRM so we know what version each customer has.

Part of my gig involves supporting a bunch of released software. Bugs happen. If I didn’t have it so that releasing patched software was push button I would go bah-zonkers.

What are you automating?

Tooling

Besides spreadsheets. There are boat loads of tools out there for automation. In my world I have used way too much NAnt and I am starting to use a ruby build tool called Rake. I’d love to hear about you have been successful with.