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0 pointstitzer6y ago0 comments

> changing yourself or your environment

After more than 25 years of using software, IMHO it's a losing battle to try to change the environment around you. It's also a losing battle to try to change yourself. You'll never keep up in the long run. After a while the pace of change becomes so rapid, and change comes from every corner at every level. Eventually what you once knew becomes useless and outdated. You can keep up to some extent, but be prepared for a lifetime of unpleasant surprises.

What works, IMO, is instead to build an environment around yourself that works for you, that protects you from the things changing that you can't control. An internal abstraction layer, a bubble. Then when the bubble breaks in little pinpricks and starts crumbling, you can repair the internal environment to be pretty much what it was before. So by all means, make your own little commands and scripts and stuff. Get cozy, but try to pick your battles wisely on what you will depend.

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hrktb6y ago

Hat's off on your 25 years!

Some of us are doing crazy stack switches mid-carrier, so maintaining a bubble around us can be a difficult option. I remember being day-in-day-out in Eclipse doing Java, and switching to a different stack meant throwing it all through the window and finding out what were the most optimized tools for the new set of tasks that will be done hundreds of time a day.

I see the same thing happening with people switching away from iOS dev for instance.

But I also agree we are in a privileged positions where on most tools we can build ourselves the layers to make it look/behave like familiar things. Especially for tools like bash or vim that purposefully change at a glacier pace compared to the rest of the stack.

I guess we usually take both approaches of learning new things to be more efficient and also building/customizing things as we see the parts where we don't want/can't change our behavior.

> Get cozy, but try to pick your battles wisely on what you will depend.

I like this phrasing a lot; nicely put.

dvfjsdhgfv6y ago

That's feasible only in some scenarios. Nowadays you often need to interact with new environments and be instantly productive in them. Also, it makes little sense trying to receate the same cozy environment between, say, EC2, WSL and FreeBSD hosts when you need to interact with them for a very short time. Welcome to the era of disposable computing.

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