Comment by KronisLV

Comment by KronisLV 12 hours ago

2 replies

> A new project and it’s going to be your best ever

A good defense against this is borrowing stuff from your prior projects, alongside eventually creating templates for the most common stuff.

For example, in new side projects I start, I can borrow the web server (ingress) configuration from the prior ones, same for CI pipelines and a large part of the previous Dockerfiles, sometimes even entire services with all of the annoying setup and configuration stuff already done.

Plus, this way, you have a more or less working baseline and further iteration is entirely up to you - and if you do want to improve things a bunch, then the next time your template will be even better and you'll be able to backport whatever you think everything should have to your other projects as well.

Going with the simplest solutions along the way helps: Bash scripts for triggering builds, CI configuration just calling those, using Docker or similar containers for the environments and builds, your ingress just being Nginx/Caddy/Apache2/..., using PostgreSQL or SQLite and specialized stuff like Redis/Valkey, RabbitMQ, MinIO and so on instead of reinventing the wheel.

Sometimes it's also useful to write utility scripts and even small tools to help with the projects, I bet developers that have been around for decades and are way better than I am have a lot of that stuff, alongside a healthy helping of dotfiles for existing tools to get in the zone while doing the dev work. Although it can also be helpful to go the YAGNI route and customize things as little as possible, like a stock IDE install, not even bothering with the color themes or keybinds or a plethora of plugins - just install and go.

glynnormington 11 hours ago

Fair point. I often copy stuff across from one project to the next. But this point is most relevant when I'm using another language etc. for the first time and I'm tempted to try to retrofit all my previous best practices.

For example, I used to work on a mainframe product that dumped the address space to disk on a crash. Then it was possible to build all sorts of fancy tooling to analyse the dump. When I moved to a different platform, without those kinds of dumps, it was tempting to try to reinvent all this stuff, but it would have been a massive time sink (and would have failed too).

mattmanser 11 hours ago

I tried this for a bit 5/10 years ago, but I've never found this to work very well. I guess I relarely start significant greenfield, non-trivial, projects. Maybe every 3 years or so.

By which time beat practice has completely changed and everything you setup is out of date.

And that's backend, it's much worse for frontend where even 6 months later your 'perfect' template is out of date.