Best IT/back-office system hacks? [closed]

Question

Lots of people have things that their systems do for them or for their teams. Source control post-commit hooks are a standard example: have an automated build system that checks out the latest source, compiles, tests, and packages it is a back-office hack that most of us probably use.

What other cool things have you done?

Answer 1

We had one developer in our team who wasn't familiar with the concept of a subversion conflict. He deduced that if he simply deleted all that weird stuff in his code and clicked resolve that everything was ok (i.e. knocking out all the other changes in the file....)

Regardless to say, after the 5th time this occurred, and the 5th time that I had to explain why that defect that I just closed was reoccuring, I wrote a script.

It would diff for the changes to a file to see whether the consecutive checkin deleted all the previous changes and that they were done by the nameless developer.

It would then send an email to the boss with a description of what happened, and how much work was lost during the checkin.

There was no 7th occurrence.

Answer 2

We have a traffic-light that shows whether our daily build succeeds, has failed tests or simply doesn't build.

Also, we have a light bar that lights up for a few seconds whenever we receive an upload from a customer.

Answer 3

We aren't staffed 24x7 but we have critical processes that run throughout the night. We created an in-house alerts system to notify us of serious system issues, failed mission-critical processes, etc. It uses text-to-speech to create a descriptive message and then connects to our automated dialer to call the appropriate people with the message.

Answer 4

Working at a web design company I configured our dev server so we could see a working copy of a project in real time by a sub domain name. So if your name was joe and you were working on project jetfuel you would go to joe.jetfuel.test-example.com and you could see your changes instantly without committing.

This was a simple hack that used sub domain names as a partial directory structure. Our htdocs path looked like this htdocs/tag/project. We had a script (a php app that you would access by setup.test-example.com) that would create a new tag name for you and checkout whatever version you wanted and call the deploy script for that project. If it succeeded it would forward you to the new sub domain. You could then work on this new copy by a samba share.

This worked really well for us since we always deployed to the same linux build and our projects had simple database requirements.

Our original reason for doing this was because our developers worked on all kinds of different platforms. Besides fixing this platform problem this was awesome for viewing changes and testing. We had all kinds of tags ranging from peoples names, trunk versions, test tags, all the way to prototypes like jquery-menu-hack.jetfuel.test-example.com

Now that I look back I wonder how much easier it would have been to run virtual machines.