Exercise: Build Throwaway Tools

Bring built

Ephemeral tools are built and thrown away. We can of course build them and keep them and share them – and then they're no longer ephemeral. So here we'll practice building tools with very little investment.

We're going to build tools to suit several briefs. You'll use your knowledge, we'll collaborate, and at the end you'll have a working rubbish tool. Then we'll think about how we built, and how we might build tools that we actually need.

Exercise 1 – page load time

We want a one-line command-line tool to return page load times.

You'll want to know about curl -w "%{time_total}\n"

Working example

Exercise 2 – check dependencies

We want a tool which, given a list of strings, checks to see which are used in nearby files, and which strings are unused.

I built a short script, and piped a file listing in.

Working example: checkrefs.sh

Exercise 3 – recent events

Working example: recent events

?? I reckon I need one for a spreadsheet-based tool