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Comment by d0m | Hacker News Reader

Contrarian opinion, but often doing things manually rather than automated will save you time. Writing/debugging a script is fun, but more often than not it would have been faster to do things the dumb way. If a task is risky or repetitive daily, then sure, but often developers confuse "writing a script because too lazy to manually do the work" vs "get the task done as fast as possible".

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Another contrarian opinion, but as much as configuring and tweaking conf files are fun, it's still faster in the long run to be highly efficient on a new system as fast as possible. It's also convenient to use standard tools to be effective on someone's else computer. For instance, it's much better if you can be productive by changing 2-3 keys in macOS settings instead of being forced to use a fancy keyboard layout and customize shortcuts for everything.

Respectfully, I've never understood this viewpoint. If the configuration options are importable from some external repository (as the vast majority of dotfiles are), "as fast as possible" simply becomes "how quickly can I install git (or my VCS of choice) and pull down my configuration options?"

For keyboards and other physical hardware, sure, you can't remap on the fly. But I'd wager the the vast majority of productivity-customizations that people implement are software-level.

As always, it depends on what you do. On your machines, sure. On customer machines, no, quickly installing a VCS and pulling some repository is often not an option.

I truly pity the developer that has to create software (a) on customer machines and (b) without VCS and pulling repositories.

It's not just creating, but also debugging, configuring, ... I'm not even sure git runs on some of the systems I work with.

And yes, some environments take a very dim view on you pulling repositories from outside their internal systems.

People should realize that any kind of system or process comes at the cost of improvisation, which is always faster and lower overhead. Doing literally anything other than doing things as they come has a cost. The gamble you're making when you write documentation, automate a test, or even write code to begin with is that the investment in doing that thing will pay dividends sometime in the future.

I only write scripts so that I'm sure that certain repetitive tasks are done correctly - this is, for me, the value proposition of automation.

Third time you do the same thing, you should probably write some script for it.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/

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