There are a lot of productivity tools out there that can help accelerate development, help organize things better, or even speed up processes. But there’s on tool that I go to more often than not that very few developers know about…

THIS POST IS SATIRE

I am currently experiencing a constant lock out of my Active Directory account due to some process probably running somewhere with my old credentials that I don’t know about. I’ve come to conclusion that I don’t have enough time to track down what’s causing it and our helpdesk doesn’t have a tool or script that can help. It doesn’t seem to get in my way all that often (my current job unlocks accounts automatically after 20 or so minutes) and if I keep doing things on a login that is validated correctly, the issue doesn’t rear its ugly head all that often. I get locked out of SSMS maybe two or three times a day, and it gives me some time to take a step away from the computer and rest or get something to drink. What’s most annoying is when my computer locks itself and my account then goes into a locked state. There’s no way to unlock the computer to work until the 20 or so minutes elapses and I can then log in again.

Normally people use these kind of scripts to help with work avoidance, hell I think almost everybody has either put their mouse on a watch or figured out some clever way to make it appear that you are at your computer, but I think I found one of the only use-cases that doesn’t involve trying to lie on a timesheet. I could think of one other that would be if you had to have your computer in a non-locked state to run a script or something, but really everyone uses these scripts for nefarious purposes.

Maybe one day I’ll figure out what’s locking my account…