Is It Worth The Time? XKCD 1205 updated for open source and shared tools.
People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won't pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here's a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.
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How many things does anyone do 50x a day, period? Apart from autonomic body functions I can't think of anything. I probably don't even stand up 50 times a day.
Sending emails, opening files, checking the database. Those are quite mundane everyday tasks of every office clerk.
Copy, cut, paste, undo. Use those keyboard shortcuts and if you work with documents for a notable part of the day you will save a half day a year or so.
I know some people who still do that with the right click menu. Then again, they don’t really copy-paste stuff very often. Maybe only once a week or so.
I'm going to click the [-] thread collapse button on Lemmy 50 times in the next ten minutes.
Type
;in JS or C.I click the left mouse button more often each day, also when you work in a production facility you have a bunch of repetitive tasks, automating them is pretty much was humanity did in the last century.
How can we shave a second of the time it takes for you to click the left mouse button?
Automate it.
When you press a button on this revolutionary machine, it will automatically left click for you!
Something we talk about at my job is being able to do stuff in our UI with less clicks, less is better.
My mouse seems to believe there is no use case for more than ten right clicks in a row, so it corrects them to left clicks. Sucks for minesweeper.