Famous Bill Gates quote:
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
There is definitely some truth here, but it may not be intuitive: What are some examples of how this plays out in real life?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Top comments (27)
Well, I guess you should always write as little code as possible. Every line you write has a chance of having a fault. For me I'd always choose to use battle-tested modules - I have a mantra: "Build what you must, not what you can".
If I have to create the same damn folder structure every other day, according to some stupid "guideline" that differs from the rest of the world, or best practices, you can be damn sure I will script the hell out of that and build a generator for it after the third time.
That way I'll just go
Or
and be done with it :D
Or build metric tons of aliases like
custom aliases for the win! Also ssh keys for passwordl-ess logins. bash/python scripts are an amazing way to streamline repetitive tasks, and make huge problems quite small.
I couldn't agree more.
If I look at the bashrc I crafted over the years, I couldn't live without it.
An alias to save a few keystrokes is probably peak lazyness.
So much this, not only from a lazyness perspective, but also security. Forging a ssh-key is probably much harder than brute forcing a password (if you don't get banned after too many failures :p)
Absolutely, though lately I prefer go, just for the benefit of not having to install a runtime anymore.
A couple of my favorites are the
ls after cdscript and this charm that I came up with that I insist be deployed everywhere that my app is running (along with a sensible multicolored prompt)what="echo `whoami`@`hostname`:`pwd`"I am absolutely going to steal that one!
A favorite of mine, even though it's absolutely useless
It's just to create fun bash histories :D
^ this
if there's something you have to do regularly, please, for the love of all that is good, find a way to automate it
As Scott Hanselman says: "we only have a limited number of keystrokes we can make in this life" -- so we have to make them count.
In my everyday life, it means
I want to leave my keyboard as little as possible
At my job, it means
Using templates for projects when you don't absolutely need to create everything from scratch all the time. I love to hate on Canva, but it makes making social media content so much easier and faster.
Bash aliases especially for git. I am too lazy to type
git push origin HEADand just usegpoh.Similarly I have a custom bash function for
git commit -m, and I usegcim. This function also adds my current JIRA ticket in commit message.Read more here:
Enforce git messages format without throwing everyone off?
Piyush Kumar Baliyan ・ Jul 2 ・ 3 min read
I just wrote a cli npm module to bootstrap typescript npm modules (including cli ones). I'd like to add an interactive mode first, but, at some point, I'm going to blog about it here.
It sets up the following:
I can go from
npxto published clihello, worldapp in about 5 minutes (of which at least a minute is creating an empty repo on github)Why did I do this? Because I wanted to seed 4 TypeScript-based NPM modules, saw a pattern and got mad with the amount of time it takes to do the above by hand. LAZY.
The right kind of lazy gets shit done :D
When I stream on twitch I have a few servers I need to run beforehand for chat interactivity, and I got so sick of remembering to do it that I set up a bash alias for "stream" which will do all of the setup for me. It saves a few seconds, but it feels great.
I like to question if things are necessary. The less I have to do the better.
For example, I was told we had to hold all the state and store it to FRAM, in case of a powercut, but it turned out that since there's no way to tell between genuinely powering off and a powercut, there's no way to tell what state is correct, so storing it is a waste of time.
I'm more from the Steve Jobs school of productive laziness: The strategic "no."
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing at all.
Yup. Wrote about that here:
Why knowing how to say "no" is important, and how to do it
Daragh Byrne ・ Sep 26 '19 ・ 5 min read
Perhaps also how I just wrote a GreaseMonkey script to automatically translate tweets when the option is available -- because I was reading some Russian dude's timeline and clicking links is so last year; perhaps I'll have enough motivation to finally learn how to create, package and release a web extension? I'll have to overcome some severe laziness first though :/
For me , I write bash scripts for automating most of the stuffs that takes me more than a minute to do manually. For instance, I have 5 different modules in 5 repositories and I have a another repository solely for storing their builds. Manually cd'ing into the individual directory, running the build command and then copying the dist back to the final repository can take me couple of minutes. So i just have a shell script do that for me :D
I also have bash aliases for commands I frequently use like for package managers (yarn,npm) and docker .Also for doing ssh . It is not that big of a deal
but saves me couple hundred keystrokes per day and also prevents me from entering any wrong commands
Using (my mechanical 😜) keyboard rather than mouse.
All the automated stuff :)
I agree with that quote !