Member-only story
12 Small Automation Scripts That Saved Me Hours Every Week
The boring scripts nobody talks about that eliminate daily friction from your development workflow
I used to spend Monday mornings doing the same soul-crushing tasks. Pull the latest code. Start Docker containers. Check if services are healthy. Open five different browser tabs. Set up my local database. Configure environment variables I’d just configured last week.
By the time I actually started coding, it was 10:30 AM. I’d lost 90 minutes to setup.
Then I discovered something that changed my career: small, specific automation scripts. Not fancy DevOps pipelines or enterprise automation frameworks. Just boring Bash and Python scripts that do one thing well.
These aren’t impressive. Nobody’s going to write Medium articles about how clever they are. But they’ve saved me approximately 8 hours per week. That’s 416 hours per year. That’s ten full work weeks.
Here are the twelve scripts I run constantly.
1. The “Start My Day” Script (15 minutes saved daily)
Every morning: pull latest code, start Docker, open my editor, start dev servers, open browser tabs I need. It took about 15 minutes of clicking…
