Just a quickie today courtesy of Mario Jason Braganza. Like most developers, Braganza is lazy in that good way that makes us search out ways to automate mundane tasks. Sometimes the automation doesn’t save much—or even any—time; it’s the principal of the thing. That and the prevention of the mental exhaustion resulting from the need to perform boring, repetitive tasks.
In Braganza’s case, that boring task is clocking in and out of tasks with a status of IN_PROGRESS. This isn’t an optimization that’s going to save any appreciable amount of time but it does collapse two tasks into the one task that it logically is. Check out his post for the exact problem that he’s trying to solve.
Although the solution is simple, he spent a day researching the problem to find it. That’s certainly more time than he’ll save in a lifetime of using the fix but it does address the all important issue of programmer mental fatigue. That and the satisfaction he gets from optimizing his workflow, even if in a small way.