Please spend 20 minutes automating/systematizing some action that you perform repetitively.
Here are a few ideas:
Create a bin/deploy script to handle any tasks that you always perform before/after deploys. (One post-deploy task I like to include: open production in my browser to make sure I didn’t just hose it somehow.)
Create an alias for shell commands that you type frequently (git commands are good candidates). Here are my zsh aliases for more inspiration.
You know that thing you do all the time that makes you think “there has to be a better way”? Dig into that and see if you’re right.
Find a way to save yourself some keystrokes.
In general: find something you do at least a few times a week and see if you can make it more pleasant. Think of it as sanding down the rough edges in your development environment.
I think you’ll find this one quite satisfying. When I automate an annoying task, I get a little burst of dopamine each time I use my new, improved method to accomplish it. One-time effort; continuous payoff.
This was perfect timing, as our deployments are still manual and I had done one yesterday. There’s a rather tedious manual process of tagging a SHA in Git when we do a release with a particular format, so I wrote a script to pull down the latest changes and given a release number tags the appropriate commit, pushes that tag to the remote, & spits out the new tag & SHA.
Definitely! Added a few aliases based on your dotfiles, but I want to re-do my whole setup now that I’ve spent some time looking at yours and thoughtbot’s.
Also, I had no idea there was a .irbrc or a .railsrc!
We have an annoying manual process for creating an updater executable using ResHacker. I finally took the time to write a batch file to run it from command line automatically after every compilation and added it into our post-build script. This is what I call the good life!
