Comments on: toolmaker

By: saying nothing | ihumanable

saying nothing | ihumanable — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:34:37 +0000

[...] recovery so we don’t have to report errors). The problem is that programmers often have to be toolmakers as well. Sometimes when making a tool for other programmers to use we let our error reporting [...]

By: macgyver | ihumanable

macgyver | ihumanable — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:06:15 +0000

[...] I’ve written about my favorite MacGyver Moment before in a previous post toolmaker, the time that I wrote an automated PL/SQL to T-SQL translation program. In that post though the [...]

By: Mark Essel

Mark Essel — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:37:11 +0000

Great example Matt. I procrastinate like he’ll, then build something I can reuse in a few hours out of desperation. It makes the task more interesting .

Actually, any time I’m adding a feature or developing an application I want, it seems to happen automagically. Enthusiasm is the secret sauce you can bring to any development effort.

Totally agree that devs can write for themselves.

By: DavidStein

DavidStein — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:53:06 +0000

Oops. Accidentally submitted early.

Stein, you lost to Smith, go run laps.

To me this is no different from,

David, I need this, this, and this from the database, and if I can’t figure out how to get it through subqueries and such, I get halfway there and look up the rest manually.

Every time this happens, I am motivated to learn more and more SQL.

It’s punitive, but it works.

By: DavidStein

DavidStein — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:51:22 +0000

“If it would take less time to do the boring thing manually then to build a tool, just suck it up and do the boring manual task ”

I suffer with this. I hate boring/repetitive tasks. In fact, I have scheduled a blog post comparing it to the punitive motivational techniques I was subjected to in high school wrestling. Stein, you lost to Smith go run