I’m not a programmer, and don’t really know that much about these things, but I’ve got an equipment dashboard at work running on an old ThinkPad I found in a cupboard.
Whenever someone takes an item of lifting gear I have to use SFTP to open the .csv register that’s held on the server, update it to include the gear that’s just been issued, then I have to SSH into the server, cd to the script’s location, then execute it.
But today I’ve worked out how to use sshfs to mount the database location on my local machine, have created a bash alias to execute the script on the server, and have connected the two computers with an SSH key. So updating the register is as easy as just opening the .csv in a local folder, then to execute the script to send the changes to the database I just type “lifting-gear” into a terminal window, and that’s that.
All that working out has taken me several hours, but it’ll save me a good minute or two every few weeks, so I consider that time well spent.
This xkcd came to mind. On one hand, I’m not sure about the time efficiency here. OTOH, figuring out this sort of workflow improvement is rewarding in itself beyond the basic time tradeoff.
The way I see it, it’s knowledge I can use in other areas. There’s at least a dozen more elements I need to add to the dashboard that I’ve cobbled together, and now most of it can be done effectively locally. I won’t have to keep SSHing into the server, which will make the workflow that much quicker.
And it’s opened my mind to looking for other ways to work smarter, which is invaluable in itself.
100% agreed. The straight up time tradeoff doesn’t account for the benefits of the learning experience.
“Why spend 5 minutes doing it when I can spend 5 days automating it?”
Exactly! 🤣
I clicked, expecting to see a different xkcd. Then I searched for the one I expected and (re-?)discovered Time (#1190) which took a fair while to go through (since I started when your comment was fairly new).
Ha, 1319 was the one that came up when I did a search for this!