written on Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Our environment has a huge influence on us, and we in return try to change it in many different ways to make it a reflection of ourselves. This statement is true for both the actual and the virtual environments we live in.
Each developer has his/her own specific preference for the editor, the set of tools they use, have their own set of aliases that they create and have a muscle memory for. This applies for the simplest of things one uses.
I personally use gpr instead of the git pull --rebase. Point is not about the two seconds I save in typing one instead of the other but is about personalization, the ease and ofcourse about the tiem one saves from avoiding repeated work. This extends to cases like vim/emacs/sublime settings, aliases which might come handy, ability to search google/stackoverflow from within the environment you are in and so on.
After getting frustrated of repeated setting of bash environment on every device and the inconsistencies it brings along, I finally figured I should host all the dot-files in a git repository to eliminate repetition of work. That is exactly what I did a few months ago and the benefits have been tremendous. A few which top the list are:
I also didn’t want to follow a series of steps every time and wanted to simplify the whole process, so ended up writing a helper script to set up the entire environment.
https://github.com/csurfer/dot-files
This as any environment would keep on changing, evolving to keep up with the new tools/technologies to make life that much simpler.