I worked for a company in the past―a distributed company. We had a policy that all developers should be able to recreate their development environment within an hour of putting a bullet through their current one. Good policy. Kept everything distributed, and lightweight :)
@deadsuperhero It's under new ownership/leadership today: but it was appendTo (born out of the jQuery project).
@jonathansampson oh my god I wish. I've had guys who spend a day arranging their desktop icons. We migrated to 7, but wiped the machines going to 8.1. Words were said.
@nromyn @jonathansampson sudo apt-get install git && git clone my-settings-and-dotfiles-repo && cd said-repo && ./setup.sh
@jonathansampson
I've always hated the developers that have a fragile edifice mostly constructed of spit and baling wire. One you don't want to breath too hard near.
Then they want you to make it work in production.
I appreciate easily duplicated software setups :)
@kurtm Keep It Simple… :)
@jonathansampson Yeah.
Good rule for developers: If you have the slightest trouble or hesitation setting up your own software, it's either bad or you aren't done until you write detailed documentation that anyone can follow.
@jonathansampson after the first two times i had to remember to install our various internal certs into a jvm, python's certifi and node before i could build stuff again i started writing scripts to restore my dev setup in a hurry. turns out they're kinda handy for other devs on my team too, but the unexpectedly cool bit was new hires are up and running waaaaay quicker
@incognitjoe @jonathansampson Yeah I did the same with Ansible. Big wins: new hires can be ready quickly and it's a stepping stone for using Ansible to provision production. Downsides so far: trying to get everyone into the Ansible-first mindset, rather than "do it manually, automate maybe later".
@cbowdon "New hires can get ready quickly"; did you have a similar policy for putting bullets in devs too? :) @incognitjoe
@jonathansampson @cbowdon our pair programming model is based on "enemy at the gates" ;) (https://youtu.be/sDXPNtaD6ZY)
@incognitjoe @jonathansampson hah, not quite so extreme. We have a small part time time that occasionally needs to scale up to a large full time team. I very rarely shoot anyone, even if they use tabs.
@jonathansampson that's sensible, I'll try to keep that in mind when looking at our projects.
i think in scala, SBT does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to setting up.
@jonathansampson i do embedded system development that often have specialized build chains. I automated the provisioning of build environments and made them available to my team. they usually prefer to pass around a 30 gb vm with hard coded paths and absurd symlinks. the cruft that builds up in these things are insane.
@jonathansampson Out of curiosity, what was the company?