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.
FYI: there is actually an XKCD font if you want to match the original more closely. https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font
I’m just trying to think of anything that I do 50x a day that takes five minutes.
Not since I was a teenager.
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.
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.
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.
…
Did you seriously see an xkcd from 3 or so years ago and get so angry that you felt the need to run and post in a forum about how they are wrong and you are actually the savior of humanity?
Heh, I can’t wait until the person who insists that detecting a desired action based upon CPU temperature is actually a very important workflow and an example of why developers need to be wary of fixing bugs