Over the years I have come to agree that "Laziness is the mother of invention".
If I have to do something more than once or twice, the first thing I think about is whether it is automatable.
One of the reasons I have always tried to stay close to the Unix view of the world is the access to simple tools that can be pipelined to provide powerful toolsets. I am a firm believer in the value of scripting things whether through shell scripting, awk, sed/vi, PERL (in the earlier days), Python etc.
The first thing I used to do when I get a Windows environment was to install cygwin or something similar that gave me access to Unix like toolsets. You may ask "Why not Powershell?" but I have been using Windows before the Powershell days and sometimes old habits are hard to break. The unix tools are almost near universal nowadays whether using Windows, Linux or MacOS/OSX.
Once you have acces to these tools simple repetitive/mundane tasks can be easily automated to increase productivity.
If I have to do something more than once or twice, the first thing I think about is whether it is automatable.
One of the reasons I have always tried to stay close to the Unix view of the world is the access to simple tools that can be pipelined to provide powerful toolsets. I am a firm believer in the value of scripting things whether through shell scripting, awk, sed/vi, PERL (in the earlier days), Python etc.
The first thing I used to do when I get a Windows environment was to install cygwin or something similar that gave me access to Unix like toolsets. You may ask "Why not Powershell?" but I have been using Windows before the Powershell days and sometimes old habits are hard to break. The unix tools are almost near universal nowadays whether using Windows, Linux or MacOS/OSX.
Once you have acces to these tools simple repetitive/mundane tasks can be easily automated to increase productivity.