One thing that helps me a lot during my everyday routine is having shortcuts for every simple action I perform. For example

• uninstalling a specific Android app
• opening the current XCode project
• opening a ‘tail -f’ on the logfile of our server

can be reached with two mouseclicks from the dock. Some of those are nothing more than a copy and paste shortcut, the others are one line of shell script. There is really no magic inside, every decent developer should be able to do that. However, at my current workplace, out of ~20 developers, I have never seen anybody creating his own. So take this article as a reminder for reviewing your daily routine and automate the most mundane tasks.

Because creating shortcuts is too easy and doesn’t deserve a howto, I will focus on scripting actions on a remote server. Be sure to use private/public key authentication, so there is no need for typing passwords 20 times a day. This doesn’t require a Unix-style operating system, it is also possible with the Putty Tools on Windows. With that, you can execute remote scripts on a server.

My most often used script looks like this:

ssh root@myserver.com

Which gives me a logged-in terminal at this server when executed. It is also very helpful to access logfiles with just one click. Just append the remote command to the commandline:

ssh tomcat@myserver.com "tail -f /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/logs/catalina.out -n 1000"

That prints the last 1000 lines of the logfile and keeps appending more lines. You might think of many more useful cases already. For example, restarting a server process, watching the network traffic with ngrep or printing the server load. You can also put these scripts into version control and use them with a team of developers.

Scripts like that saved me a lot of time already, and only take a few minutes to set up. And the much more important benefit is, that I use the available information much more often. If it takes 3 seconds to open the logfile, I will look into it even for small problems. But if it takes 30 seconds of a mundane and repetitive workflow…