About two years or so ago, I automated the build of a sheet music project (don’t ask 😅). It was working fine.

Then a few weeks ago at $DAYJOB, we considered using Makefiles to automate something and I decided, I’d just play around how you might automate that same sheet music build with Makefiles.

Then I realized they’re a much better match for that build and decided to rewrite the whole build in them.

Then I realized that, actually, it should be possible to define general rules to build any similar sheet music project. So, now I’m trying to build a flexible, user-friendly build system based on a Makefile.

The original build was working fine.

Send help… 🫠

(Actually don’t; it’s great fun. 🙃)

Automation is cancer

The task also only needs to be done once so the logical sollution is a one click automated script. 🖱

I do reports every month that automation could make less of a headache (maybe I should vibe code a solution)

And afternoon to save 5 minutes is almost certainly worth automating if you’re doing it over the long term, to be fair

Why spend 10 minutes doing a repetitive task by hand if you can spend an afternoon automating it?

relevant XKCD

and the other one

One of my professors had a poster that said something to the effect of ‘programmers will spend 10 hours to save 10 minutes’. It always seemed rather ironically true.