Build Tools. Automate.

[by: redacted]

Mainly I never focused on “automation” thinking it was just boring to automate tasks and legends do their work by hand.. well, that’s true BUT real fun is when you spend some hours automating your work and then spend less or no time on doing some or almost all part of it.

At work I deal with Github Actions and after testing we move code to production. Now there are multiple CI/CD pipelines and hosting services running and I have to monitor them and see if everything’s working perfectly or not. So I made a CLI tool in go that shows me real-time updates of all the running jobs of Github Actions right in my terminal. If a build test or build fails it shows me a notification and redirects me to that url automatically + on top of that I can test response time and output quality right from my terminal thanks the toolkit I made.

Not much big of a deal but I’m saving myself time here. I can push to branch and I’ll get notified if any test/build fails and if everything worked perfectly I can either send sample request based on template or send a custom one. There might be existing solutions out there for this specific task as well but I crafted this tool for my specific need just as I wanted it to be.

Recently I made another CLI tool Flawa which comes in handy when I have to deal with generating code documentation reports. I can just run the tool in my command line and it’ll parse target file or files from a directory generate summary report of code files and store them at a place in markdown format. Saving me time again and with some PROOMPT ENGINEERING I can change base prompt in config file and use it for some other thing let’s say getting summary of API endpoint inputs and outputs.

If I have a specific file to deal with then I can pass it through flawa and get a summary of it right away without having to open, copy/paste etc. So these things even if are small are useful and you can build something like these things to automate your repeatitive work. It’s hard for everyone to be an idea person but it all sums up to solving problems that are around you. If you think you’ll get skill issued while working on something that’s the fun part of it that’s where you actually learn something. Use LLMs, use docs, use whatever and just learn and get it done.

What’s the point of telling you all this you ask? Build things that are actually useful - things you or others will genuinely use. Sure, build that ToDo app to learn a new framework - that’s fine. But don’t showcase it as a “Personal Project.” Your portfolio deserves better than tutorial projects. Build something worth showcasing. Then showcase that.

Want more? Read this gem article.

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