Compiling away the day

I've been coding more recently (after a year or so of meetings!)
Waiting for code to compile sucks (Picasa's up to 500k lines!), and so I've been, uh, optimizing it.

First thing was I made an auto-builder script that has an icon in my taskbar. When you click it, it syncs to source control, does release and debug builds, and doesn't ask any questions. So anytime you like you can push this button on one of my machines and walk away. That helps quite a lot.

But better than that, now I've scheduled a task in XP to do this automatically anytime I'm away from my desk for more than 10 minutes, or every hour otherwise. Seems wasteful, but the machine's on anyway. The results are amazing - I can sit down at any time and make a small code change, and I rarely have to wait for compiles.