You have to crawl before you can walk

Ants.

• Ants on a log - delicious (I love the chewy raisins with the crunchy celery and peanut butter).
• Ants are bugs and you can get bugs in your code - bad.
• They can lift several times their body weight - awesome.
• Ants are ferocious - `cause they're fast.
• They work together as a team to accomplish large feats - I heart teamwork.
• Each was made for a specialized task - you gotta be yourself, I like that.
  

Are these reasons why Apache's ANT was named as such? Sadly, no. But I think they should all be candidates. Ant stands for Another Neat Tool (which you can find on their wiki), although I wonder what Indians** have to do with anything. They do, however, describe some of the reasons why Ant turns out to be a fitting name after all - ummm, except the one about celery. I just really like peanut butter celery.

Ant (and it's .NET cousin NAnt) are described as a build tool like the infamous make utility for C, but without the wrinkles. If you managed to make it this far and you're a developer you're probably thinking - Forget the "wrinkles", I never liked make, I think build files are a waste of time, and even if it is "neat" I don't need anymore tools to deal with. If you're not a developer you're thinking - this doesn't affect me and our products are just fine without any of this. Both of you might be right, but you can write code in most languages without an Integrated Development Environment too. IDE's make it easier on everybody and adding a build file might be a good idea too...

The title of this post, while clever (at least I think so), has some meaning. Developer's often times overlook tools that can make their lives easier. If you've ever heard the term "it's the little things that kill", you can see why it's important to get the little things dealt with and build tools like Ant can help.

** I think there's a lot to how things are named. The wrong name can give the wrong impression about something or be misleading. I think Apache is a superb name for a software development group. Here's why.