We’ve all heard the slogan, “Work smarter, not harder.” Easily said, hmm? When you work more efficiently you can crank out your share of work and more, and still leave the office at a decent hour. How? How you ask!

Once into a project, a decent engineer will find patterns which eventually become drudgery. Mindless typing, cut-and-paste, modify, and on to the next module. Why do grunt work manually when you have a computer waiting to do your bidding? All you need is a bit of automation.

My favorite automation tool is Perl. Many find Perl a quirky throwback to cryptic codification, but wait. TMTOWTDI! There Is More Than One Way To Do It. With decent programming style and comments where Leaning Toothpick Syndrome is unavoidable, Perl programs can be readable, too.