Programmers Should Automate More

But where are the tools? Of course I can always write a shell script, but the vast majority of GUI tools is not programmable.

I would love to automate my image capturing workflows, my tax filing, my invoicing, my calendaring, my contacts, and SO many other things. But most tools are not scriptable. They are sealed, proprietary binaries that I can't interact with.

Conversely, I love tools like the shell, Emacs, and programming tools in general, because I can automate them. I can automate testing, compiling, generating reports... And if something is not built-in, these tools provide hooks and APIs to extend their functionality for my particular use cases.

In fact, we can already see the impact of smartphone-only students on their ability to grasp and automate complex workflows. The fact that mobile apps are largely non-composable and non-programmable seems to seriously limit students' abilities in general digital problem solving.

This is the whole promise of UNIX. Do something once? Write a shell on-liner at the console. Do it a second time? Save your one-liner to ~/bin or as a shell function in your .${SHELL}RC. Need something more complex than a one-liner? Grab Ruby or another "loose" language that adds some sanity -- but importantly not too much.

When you build tools, try to add options to make my tools more flexible and amenable to scripting. Options like -z, to separate records on STDOUT with NULL, or having a trailing -- read input from STDIN, make tools much easier to script.

This is gonna sound funny, but once way to train yourself to do this is playing Factorio[1]. Virtually every new thing you can build starts off as "that's a pain, I'll just make it manually" and rapidly graduates to "oh I need 5000 of them." You learn to just build at least a minimal production line for everything.

[1] https://www.factorio.com/

The first and second times I do something, I do them manually. The third time, I create a repeatable procedure that I execute manually. The third time I use that, I start writing scripts to take bites out of the time it takes.

Around the 30th or so time I have to do it, there's no point to automating any further. But I've learned that automating to the point where you can put it on a cron job is usually just not worth it. You haven't yet squeezed out all the failure cases. If you could have completely scripted it and put it on a cron job you would have done it at the beginning.

Usually when I find myself doing this, I'm doing it in response to emails that have been sent with spreadsheets. It's a huge time pit to automate that the first time you get one. You just don't know what they're going to keep sending you each month, and you feel like such an asshole nagging them about it. Just make a note in your procedure, and use an error to detect the case when you finally script it.

Another great tool is Everything https://www.voidtools.com for Windows.

It's searching files with an ease that you start question yourself why windows search is so fucking retarded

While Lightshot Screenshot is great, it cannot upload screenshots to other services than prntscr.com and that makes it unsuitable for sensitive information.

So far I've only found Greenshot that is cross-platform and let you choose where to save the screenshot (It's also open source).

I think a lot of programmers (and many other professions) can speed up a lot by learning how to type properly with 10 fingers.

This is what Smalltalk and Lisp workstations promised and went some way into accomplishing, but they have never been built into the current generation of desktops like Linux and Windows.

We even have Emacs where everything is configured with elisp. The current problems come from building on the wrong foundations. The whole desktop paradigm and OS paradigm needs to be rebooted, and sure as hell the impetus will not come from Microsoft, Apple or Google, who seem to be entrenching sub par practices.

imacros [1] for firefox has been great for automating long tasks and can also be used on sites, that generate html elements with dynamic ID (for example typo3 backend). Together with csv files, it's excellent. I spent two days to find it, so you don't have to :))

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imacros-for-f...

The problem for me is in properly estimating the time it will take to automate a particular task. I often underestimate the time it takes to do it well enough to cover all the cases I would handle intuitively.

Usually though I never regret it - once it is done. But at the time putting a day or two dent in my schedule makes me pretty cross.

My coworker has that XKCD comic on the wall. He spends so much time trying to figure out what is worth his time to automate that all potential time savings are negated.

The author mentioned starting a static web server in any folder. I'd be interested in Windows solutions for this. I usually just run Apache and vhosts on my Windows laptop.