Streamlined Testing
I was once set to test a certain piece of equipment on a ship. The test involved attaching the unit to a reader, then running loads of command-line commands. Then, one would have to make a copy of all the text, copy it into word, and save it as a real ugly report. There were hundreds of units, and they needed to be tested several times a year.
We did about 20 to 30 a day, and it would take several weeks to finish. I didn’t know coding at the time, but always wanted to learn it. Within two months, I had made a program that could read three units at a time, automatically create a smooth pdf report, and save the report on our server, named with serial number and date.
The job was now to attach three units, then wait for about three minutes, detach, and attach new ones. Basically, I had 30 seconds of work, and three minutes of break. I could now test all the units in a day, though I would typically spread it out over a couple more days. When I left the company, I left the program on the test computer.
I got an email from an ex-colleague a few months later, saying they were using the program on several ships now. There wasn’t any manual for the program, of course, but it was so straightforward that it wasn’t needed.