I’ve observed in myself and others that the tools we build for personal usage are often of poor quality in the sense of maintainability or craftsmanship or reproducibility. They’re often built in a ramshackle way.
So in one sense, these tools don’t deserve any pride cast their way.
However, some of the things that I’ve built and used the longest fall into this category. These tools are very needs-fitting. This engenders some sort of pride.
There’s a tool I use probably a dozen times a day and has been evolving for 20 years. It’s unrecognizable from it’s original state. It’s nothing groundbreaking and is simple compared to many of the things I do. It’s a tool for building tools.
Not long after Windows XP came out 20 years ago I really got into automating my OS. Everything from “this window should always go here” to “when I press this hotkey give me the results of pinging this server”. I wanted it to be simple enough that I could whip up something to do one-off automation of little problems that I might only need to automate for a short time. The code and practices went from C (eww) to AutoIT (ick) to AHK (double ick) back to AutoIT (still icky) and nowadays to Python, but the same principles and purposes have carried through to this day.
To make it “production-ready” by addressing the “maintainability or craftsmanship or reproducibility” mentioned above, I’ve recently been putting a spit shine on it all, rewriting it, and making it less tailored to me and more general purpose. It’s called systa and you can see it here.
I’m too involved in it to objectively say if it’s a tool that I should have thrown away or not. Other automation tools exist. But I think it’s (or is going to be...maybe) better for some use cases than other things that are available out there.
I’ve observed in myself and others that the tools we build for personal usage are often of poor quality in the sense of maintainability or craftsmanship or reproducibility. They’re often built in a ramshackle way.
So in one sense, these tools don’t deserve any pride cast their way.
However, some of the things that I’ve built and used the longest fall into this category. These tools are very needs-fitting. This engenders some sort of pride.
There’s a tool I use probably a dozen times a day and has been evolving for 20 years. It’s unrecognizable from it’s original state. It’s nothing groundbreaking and is simple compared to many of the things I do. It’s a tool for building tools.
Not long after Windows XP came out 20 years ago I really got into automating my OS. Everything from “this window should always go here” to “when I press this hotkey give me the results of pinging this server”. I wanted it to be simple enough that I could whip up something to do one-off automation of little problems that I might only need to automate for a short time. The code and practices went from C (eww) to AutoIT (ick) to AHK (double ick) back to AutoIT (still icky) and nowadays to Python, but the same principles and purposes have carried through to this day.
To make it “production-ready” by addressing the “maintainability or craftsmanship or reproducibility” mentioned above, I’ve recently been putting a spit shine on it all, rewriting it, and making it less tailored to me and more general purpose. It’s called systa and you can see it here.
I’m too involved in it to objectively say if it’s a tool that I should have thrown away or not. Other automation tools exist. But I think it’s (or is going to be...maybe) better for some use cases than other things that are available out there.