Today, workmate did a demo on the side project that he has been working on for the past few days. He built a code generator or maybe a better term for it is website generator. It generates a site structure/skeleton along with its CMS, CRM etc2 and the database related to that site just by a click of a button. And after that developers can just use this skeleton as a base for his project.
I think that’s probably the best thing that someone has ever built during the past few months I’m working here. Apparently he’s so inspired by Ruby on Rails, which does this generation thing all the time.
Of course a code generator is really not something new, it dated even before Ruby was invented. It’s a nice concept, it can be implemented in environment. While maybe in Ruby on Rails, it is easier to auto generate codes, you can in fact write your own code generator which what my workmate did. It can potentially save us a lot of times whenever we need to set up new projects.
I’ve been thinking of doing this sort of thing myself, but never got around to do it.. I guess that’s what is good about this particular colleague, he thinks it’s worth his time (and company’s time) to do this, and he just does it. I found this pretty impressive and very inspiring, makes me think what other cool side projects that I can do to improve the workflow.
Wait I just realized.. I think the term code generator could possibly mean different thing that what I’ve just described.