Why We Love Lazy Programmers

At one time our build and deploy process was full of manual steps and could take 1-2 days to put a build into the QA and Dev environments. Using tools like nAnt we improved the build and deploy time to 1-2 hours with most of the automation on the build side. Later one developer got tired of manually deploying and created some deploy scripts. Now deployment to any of the 5 environments (development, testing, staging, demo, production) is a single command line taking 1-10 minutes depending on whether a full build is required or not.

The overall investment was probably about 2 weeks of development time over several months. So we easily paid back the cost in 15 deployments. Not to mention the fact that we deploy all the time now that it is easy, resulting in our integration problems almost going away.

What are your lazy programmer success stories?

2 Comments

  • My big experience with lazy programmers is that I've worked with LAZY PEOPLE, employed as progammers. They wouldn't want the endless paperwork, support calls, forced social interaction and mundane manual processing that lousy apps deliver, so they'd bust their butts on building something really solid.



    (Of course, I'm assuming such is a rarity.)



    Another true lazy programmer I supervised a few years back lent his own scruples into hs design - specifically, being wayy too lax with minor details. On a web project, when we had to store files in a folder, he'd think this was below him and just randomly hit 29 keys on the keyboard without looking, to generate some stupid name for a subdirectory that neither myself, nor he, could find.

  • I added unit tests to my data access layer, mainly to get notified when the DBAs would surrepititiously change parts of the data model and not notify us. It worked great. After it was installed they would get beat up in the project status meetings instead of me. :)

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