Automate like a Rockstar

From BriansWiki

Presenter: Marc Esher MXUnit.org download

[edit] How/why

• Personal Productivity
• Productive Programmer (web site?)
• Ask yourself Do I want to be this thing (the computers) master or its server

[edit] Shortcuts

• control "n" is a new file in eclipse
• control "m" maximizes an eclipse window
• automation in the small breaks down barriers to getting things done
• f12 runs code in a browser in Eclipse
• control "l" in Firefox gets you in the address bar

[edit] Batch Files

• Windows centric presentation
  • Going to the services panel and starting a service is Monkey work - write a batch file to start this for you
  • Put a folder on the task bar so you can run your bat files from there but this can get over-loaded
  • I know what I want to run - now I need to know where it is
  • Keyboard launchers e.g. [launchy]
    • Can simulate mouse clicks and keystrokes
    • Combination of Launchy and Bat files is super efficient

[edit] Snippets

• if you type it more than once put it in a snippet
• trigger text + control "j" launches a snippet
• you can do variables replacement with

[edit] Systems Automation

• Ant
  • XML COmpliant tag language
  • Top level - "Project" tag with desription
  • Ant uses ${varName} for outputing variables similar to cfml #varName# signs
  • Copy, zip , move, ftp,
  • include other code like cfinclude
    • you do this with the depends property
    • C:\Windows\Sysnative is system32 on a 64 bit vista system
• Scheduled task
  • Runs a batch file to update perforce everyday at startup or a scheduled time
  • Cron on windows

[edit] apache [jmeter]

• starts with a batch file
• create test plans
• specify the number of simultaneous users
• create thread group
• select option in the test plan to run the tests consecutively if you are trying to see which approach is the fastest
  • add a sampler to a thread group
• add a report to see the results of a run
• Good for testing database update methods too