During this presentation I will present 12 scripts and hacks, ready to be copied and pasted into your project. They may either save you time directly, or help you cut down on the vast number of “TODOs” you have to juggle and keep track of in your mind when being responsible for an application portfolio. This way, you will hopefully have more time focusing on what you should spend most of your time doing: pushing code- or configuration changes into a production environment. Some scripts may be directly applicable to your project “as-is”, whereas others may function as a basis for customization and adaption to similar tasks. A few may even help you identify similar tasks and processes you falsely consider to be a “tedious manual job that I hopefully won’t have to repeat later”.

And even if you cannot justify the few couple of hours it takes with a direct ROI within your first week, see these scripting jobs as an exercise to stay sharp. It is like doing ten push-ups before going to bed - you know it is good for you, and that it only takes a couple of minutes - you just conveniently “forget” it. If you are still not convinced, see these small scripting jobs as a way to improve your mental hygiene, by allowing yourself to do boring work in a fun way. If you find writing scripts more boring than creating and following up documents and spreadsheets, then you might be ready for a career change.

Many of the example scripts have, by choice, been written in languages that do not need extensive installation procedures, lots of configuration, or big frameworks. The languages include Bash/Cygwin, Windows Command Line / PowerShell, cleartool, SQL, ant, and ”JUAN”; a home-made notification addon to JUnit.