As programmers, we have superpowers. The superpower to do things faster than non-programmers by using the proper technology and coding skills.
We should use it whenever we get the chance. I realized that after I had been doing an operation in a very slow way and I could have easily done that 100 times faster.
What happened was I was working on a legacy PHP system. We deployed it to the server using FTP. But it was a large codebase as it also included the dependencies.
So uploading it took a lot of time, 25 minutes or so.
But since my peer told me to use FTP, I didn’t think twice. I used to do other things while the project was uploading. After a while, I realized rsync can also transfer files to the server via SSH.
So I hooked rsync over it and the process which earlier took 25 minutes was completed in a few seconds.
This 10 minutes of setting up rsync now gives me a more streamlined workflow as I can sync the entire server in a jiffy and don’t have to wait anymore.
An inefficient process was replaced by the most efficient process. Once I realized that I started optimizing other places in my workflow that were slow.
One should always do this. There’s no reason to not optimize things. It frees up time which is the most valuable commodity for us.
Look for unreasonably slow things and try to optimize them.
Find tasks that you repeatedly do and automate them.
You will be glad once you do it.