People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won’t pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here’s a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.

  • autokludgeEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    I have a lot of repetition in my job (CAD modeller). Even just knowing keyboard shortcuts & setting up shortcuts for frequently used operations can easily net me 5 seconds per operation. I want to spend my energy on solving the task at hand, not on how to use the tool in the moment. I don’t want to move the mouse away from the work area if I can help it.

    Maybe not as frequent 5 per day - but scripts for really bottom of the barrel stuff:

    • Cycle thru all currently open drawing documents, zoom to full page and force save.
      • zoom out ensures drawing can be identified from document thumbnail.
      • the software is known to crash, especially editing drawings.
      • easy 10mins duplicated work saved.
    • Printing all open drawings out to the office printer in order with a delay between them, so i don’t spend the next 20 minutes manually sorting the drawing prints.
      • printers don’t always print in incoming order, some documents take longer to process.
    • find/replace for text notes
      • the software doesn’t have that feature.