Question

I have being toying with the idea of creating software “Robots” to help on different areas of the development process, repetitive task, automatable task, etc.
I have quite a few ideas where to begin.
My problem is that I work mostly alone, as a freelancer, and work tends to pill up, and I don’t like to extend or “blow” deadline dates.
I have investigated and use quite a few productivity tools. I have investigated CodeGeneration and I am projecting a tool to generate portions of code. I use codeReuse techniques. Etc.
Any one as toughs about this ? as there any good articles.

Answer 1

I wouldn’t like to use code generation, but I have developed many tools to help me do many of the repetitive tasks.

Some of these could do nice things:

Email Robots

These receive emails and do a lot of stuff with them, they need to have some king of authentication to protect you from the bad stuff :

• Automatically logs whatever was entered in a database or excel spreadsheet.
• Updates something in a database.
• Saves all the attachments in a specific shared folder.
• Reboot a server.

Productivity

These will do repetitious tasks:

• Print out all the invoices for the month.
• Automatically merge data from several sources.
• Send reminders of GTD items.
• Send reminders of late TODO items.
• Automated builds
• Automated testing

Administration

These automate some repetitive server administration tasks:

• Summarize server logs, remove regular items and send the rest by email
• Rebuild indexes in a database
• Take automatic backups