After some time of being a student, and a tech worker [Software Engineer, IT Consultant, or  System Administrator], you should start to find ways to make your job easier.  These are some of the things I found helpful:

  • Create templates for daily status emails. If your employer/ client requires a daily status, this makes the task of writing up the daily status easier. Outlook has the ability to keep track of email templates.

    • If the daily status is being sent to multiple people it may be helpful to create a distribution list. A distribution list is less likely to lose contacts between statuses.

    • One template a coworker of mine uses is this template.

  • Create filters for emails. This can help reduce the amount of email that requires attention. For example if a group communicates with a shared distribution list then create a rule or a filter that can organize that into a separate folder. This can also clear out “Build succeeded” emails [if your company automatically subscribes you to those] How To Create Rules In Outlook. How to Create GMail Filters.

  • Use SSH keys: SSH Keys can save a little bit of time by creating password-less logins. Also with SSH keys, scripts are able to run commands on other SSH enabled boxes. This means that much of the repetitive system administrative tasks can be automated. [Gentoo Guide to SSH This include generic non-gentoo instructions.

  • SSH Commands: SSH Commands are shell-less sessions in which a user logs into a SSH box with a key to kick off only one specific command. For example, say you had to reset an environment, and it required quite a few commands. With an SSH command, you would combine all of those commands and then kick off the command as an SSH command with its own key. From there on, you could kick off those commands by connecting to the SSH box with the key.  More information.

  • Backups- It can’t hurt to backup your data. I’ve never found a single person that was reliable at doing this frequently. Setting up rsync, SSH-keys and making it a cron job is a good first step. I’ve heard good things about luckyBackup, but I haven’t had a chance to try it. 

  • Using Salt/Puppet to automate system administrative tasks on multiple machines. This would be a bit more helpful for those who regularly roll out new software to multiple machines, or need to perform other system admin tasks.

  • IfThisThenThat (Review) is an online service that connects other online services to perform the intended result. For example, if a Google search reveals specific keywords, you can have that update a twitter account.