Sometimes I feel like a magician because as a developer, I get to build whatever comes to my mind - whether it's a new product or a small script to automate tedious activities. The latter is what I'd like to ask you, awesome peeps, about. But first...
My story
I've been working on my new developerHabits Youtube channel. Additionally, I finally opened an Instagram account, where I plan to post tips&tricks about development and habits.
As I wanted the posts to look nice, I created a template in Sketch for all my short-text posts.
After creating 2 of those images I found it's time-consuming to change the text, export the file and start again...
So as a true developer, I created a script to automate this job.
What it does:
- Reads an array of texts
- For each text element, replaces my Sketch template's placeholder text
- Saves the file as a .png
So now all I have to do is just...come up with quality content!
It took me just about an hour, but when I finally finished, I was really happy, as it's something real and saves me time in the long run.
That leads me to my question...
Top comments (6)
makefileorpackage.json, but I like apackage.jsonmore cause it works on every OS.I think thats it.
Thank you for sharing :)!
What did you automate about Git message template?
Oh yeah some of my project requires different git message format it is just
.gitmessagetemplate that i had in my Templates home folder. Basically just copy paste thing.I've grouped most of my automation into an end-of-day and start-of-day script.
The former actually runs overnight to help me estimate my sleep patterns, giving me a place to take notes if anything occurs to me (reason I think I woke up, for example) or ask for the time (text-to-speech, so I can keep my eyes closed) while racking up time between start and end, and then ends by grabbing weather information, figuring out what blog posts are going out for the day, running proselint against the blog post(s), and dumping out the notes I typed overnight.
The other script kills my e-mail client, so that I don't spend the entire night replying to people, then backs up things I think are important to my server, some
rsynccalls and some committing and pushing git repositories with decent (not great) commit messages.There are obviously others for specific tasks, such as publishing to my blog and making sure the source repository is up to date, but they're only used when needed.
So far, I haven't gotten up the courage to schedule any of them, though, which is probably the next big step...
Wow John! Thank you for sharing.
Reading your post, I see I've got a long way to go!
Oh, it's always going to be a tiny bit at a time. I'm pretty sure the first version of each was at least five years ago and always getting little things added. Twenty-something years of using UNIX-like system, and I'm only just realizing that I should have been using arrays for a lot of things...