The importance of being a lazy developer

Fri 22 July 2011

Disclaimer: I originally published this write up at theTeam opinion section

Working with creative agences quick turn arounds and time sensitive deadlines are always there. To deliver products from the technical side of things there are tasks that are performed once or several times, such as:

• Create the project codebase
• Provision the server, or servers stack
• Make sure that all our developers work with the same stack and codebase
• Integrate the codebase to our continuous integration process
• Deploy the application

At theTeam we have a useful stack of tools that help us "hit the ground running" and reduce the time we spend on the above tasks. Most of these tools are available on the web and open sourced, others have been developed in-house and are already available on our github page while new ones are making their way there, so watch this space.

Since we let this set of tools handle all the boilerplate we can concentrate on the things that really matter: making our customers happy by providing them with the right solution to their needs, writing more tests for our application and giving it some nice techie features. We love being good citizens of the web, and we will go great lengths to build our applications the right way.

So how do you find out if you need a tool to do [INSERT TASK HERE] for you?

Well, what we use as a thumb rule is: if we find ourselves performing a task several times then let's automate it and never worry about it again (OK from time to time we will need to amend it because this is the nature of the web, but you get the idea).

So yes, I am a lazy developer because, when possible I will automate as many tasks as I can and save myself time, and as an extra bonus the tool won't forget any of the steps that the task involves.

So if you find yourself with not enough time to write those unit or integration tests, or implement that extra feature, or wondering why the application is not working on the production server, maybe you should be a lazy developer too.

Photo credit: machintoy on flickr