Ask HN: What tools have you written that had a great impact on productivity

2 pointsmpatobin2 comments

The was a long discussion here[0] about the pros and cons of sharing tools/scripts to increase productivity but there weren't a lot of people describing what they've created. I thought it would also be a good discussion.

What have you created for your self or your team that helped boost productivity by an outsized amount?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29486243

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I developed a node editor that generates state machines in rust to simplify/prune abstract syntax trees.

It greatly improved my productivity. I can't imagine creating a complex state machine in a non-visual way. Code (functions in a source code file) is organized linearly, whereas a state machine is a graph.

When in retail IT I created a script that improved the daily polling processes from hundreds of retail stores to the central system. All I did was make it more resilient to error conditions, and re-poll any error’d stores once.

Before: I’d start work and manually fix ~30% of sites which didn’t poll properly

After: I’d fix the one or two, usually their link had been down for a while or was still down and I couldn’t get the data anyway. it saved around 60-90 min a day

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