Sometimes a to-be-judged-workman needs to quarrel with his tools and fix them

Wow! thats a mouth-ful of a blog title! I'm spending most of active workhours today trying to improve the way i work with my tools! So yep - what are my tools and what do i do? Well I'm a programmer and a compiler, debugger and build system are my tools!!! So i need to constantly learn to make optimial use of these tools. But the real truth is that i'm a knowledge worker and i want to improve my workprocess to a level where i can effectively reutilize what i learn each time with minimal overhead, so that way my efficiency will increase. I'm thinking of writing few visual studio snippets which i can use each time i'm doing a familiar task, also have some stubs ready for testing and yep! design/prototype-design before i write :). Just a passing thought in my evolution as an engineer (?)!

What have we achieved in Software in last ten years?

As i troll day in and day out doing my day job, I'm wondering what has my discipline achieved in last tem years. I'm amazed that i cant say anything much, since the internet happened i think we are stuck! I want the profession to provide the rapid fire flexible solutions which can make our lives easy - not handle like 50 password logins or fight with reinstalling nightmares. Can we really make out software smart? Will the smart phone someday really become smart? I'm experimenting with some ideas and will try to get out the prototypes soon. We have achieved a lot in this profession but i think the engineering discipline could do a lot better and actually put us to an era where we can actually think about things rather than think how we can do something which we have already thought! I know this vague but i promise i'll elaborate this with examples. Currently the running one i'm using is to make my smartphone really smart! - i wont switch from a feature phone until i'm convinced that my smartphone is worth the smartness i get.