Comments on: every team needs a toolsmith

By: Shawn Hoover

Shawn Hoover — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:35:47 +0000

Sorry, Frank, those tools are usually developed behind closed doors at companies who use but don’t contribute to open source. No one’s building Cache tools at home in their free time for fun.

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:47:09 +0000

Hi Jon, are those Cache tools open source or otherwise available? I think of myself as a toolsmith as well but obviously a good toolsmith doesn’t reinvent the wheel all the time… I find that many Cache toolsmiths are not really into sharing their work with others. Hopefully things are different here…

By: The return of chui red/green indicators « Our Craft

The return of chui red/green indicators « Our Craft — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:07:05 +0000

[...] getting started*. Part of just getting started is a lack of tool support. Funny – when Jon talked about the importance of maintaining a readiness to create tools that streamline the work in your specific [...]

By: Anthony Panozzo

Anthony Panozzo — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:22:44 +0000

Hey Jon,

I like the idea of having a toolsmith and I also think it’s important for everyone on the team to see opportunities for automation. Even if someone can’t implement the solution, seeing the improvement is a step in the right direction.

Automating is appealing to me because it makes getting into flow easier and reduces mental complexity. There is only so much energy and time, so being able to multiply a given amount of energy and time gives great rewards. It’s a morale booster to think about how much you have sped up the process.

By: Shawn Hoover

Shawn Hoover — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:08:20 +0000

Man you made me dig deep for the diff generation tool. That’s fuzzy, but now I’m recalling a shared drive with piles of before and after directories and a copy of WinMerge.

A recent “automation” win for me came from the need to test some C# code. I needed a separate process I could call over and over, not an nunit fixture. Instead of adding another exe project to the Visual Studio solution and slowing down builds forever, I just loaded my library in a tiny IronRuby script and called it. Simple, but it automated away the ceremony of an extra project.