Now that Ed is a "professional" programmer, he needs to think seriously about his "tooling". And by that, we mean all the supporting technology that comes alongside actually writing code. Gear lik computers, screens, keyboards, and mice (mouses?) is important, but so is the more ephemeral side of things. Which project-management methodology your company uses has a big impact on what your programming-day looks like. And so to do the software tools you choose.

So how long should you spend automating your build process? How much tooling is too much tooling? At what point do your systems and processes get in the way of actually doing work? Find out in this week's automated instalment of A Question of Code.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Automate the boring stuff with Python, book by Al Sweigart
• Logitech MX Master mouse
• The Agile Manifesto
• The Agile Revolution, episode of the Command Line Heroes podcast
• The Pragmatic Programmer book by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt