This is something I talk about a lot in my technical training, and I really mean it. There are a couple of things I would like everyone to think about:
First, programming is automating. If you are a programmer what you do is tell computers how to do things for people. That is automation. If you need to do things you should take advantage of the talent you have for automating and automate the things you need to do.
Second, as a programmer your time is expensive. Also, the things you program are complex and the opportunity to make mistakes is ever present. For both of these reasons you don’t want to be doing the same things over and over again. Any time you are going to do the same thing again you should automate it.
I want all the programmers out there to be very suspicious of doing things that are similar to things they have done before. When you write some code that is similar to code you have written before you are creating duplication. You should find that duplication and refactor to eliminate it.
Similarly, when you have to do some activity that you have done before, such as testing for regressions, deploying an application onto a server, uploading data to a database, creating some report, or any of the many administrative tasks you do every day, you should automate it. That way you will spend less time doing it over and over and you will have fewer opportunities to make mistakes.
Faster and higher quality for the small cost of a little programming (Ostensibly what you want to be doing anyway.) How does that sound?
