You come across a lot of interesting things when you are searching the Internet, and while some of it is out of this world or just plain stupid, there are just some things you can’t ignore. Today, I came across this interesting blog and GitHub post, and although I can’t validate their authenticity, it is just too funny not to share with readers.
Ever daydream sometimes that you could just leave work and nobody would notice, or that there was clone of yourself that could go to work while you slept in? One programmer didn’t need to dream this; he made it come true.
(Related: Testing on mobile devices can be automated too)
When one build engineer decided to leave his job for another company, his coworkers decided to look at the work he did at his desk. “The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown… If something—anything—required more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that,” according to a blog post.
And they weren’t kidding when they said he automated everything. After going through his work, his ex-coworkers found automated scripts ranging from responding to e-mails to making coffee.
One script was designed to send a text message to his wife if he was going to be late at work. The script selects from a random array of strings if there is any activity on his computer after 9 p.m.
Another script was designed to respond to a client he disliked. If the client e-mailed him with keywords such as help, trouble or sorry, the script “SSHes into the client’s server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply: ‘No worries mate, be careful next time,’ ” according to the blog.
Other scripts included sending automated sick-day e-mails if there is no activity on his server by 8:45 a.m., and sending a message to the coffee machine to brew a mid-size half-caffè latte.
“We had no frikin’ idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs Linux and has SSHD up and running,” according to the blog. “The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes [sic] desk.”
His scripts are now available on GitHub, FWIW.