Last month, I literally dunked my work laptop in coffee. (Check your bag for standing liquid before dropping your laptop in it, kids!) I took this opportunity to tune up my workstation setup process–first with the loaner, then with the repaired laptop when it returned a couple of weeks later. (Aside: I almost always set up new workstations from scratch instead of restoring from backup images.)
Here are the results of my work, which I’m happy to have open sourced last week.
ruralocity/dotfiles: I’ve had my dotfiles stored in a private repository for years, and have found chezmoi the best solution for me for managing them. I am still guilty of letting my dotfiles get out of sync across computers, but that’s my fault, not chezmoi’s. Anyway, I found it’s a lot simpler to set up a new workstation from a chezmoi repository if that repo’s public, and there wasn’t really a reason for me to keep mine private. So here you go, world.
My dotfiles are still a little messy, and in some places Mac-specific, but they’re out there now for reference. If you take nothing else away from them, I strongly suggest installing all the things you can via a Brewfile–even apps you’d typically install via the Mac app store.
ruralocity/gh-clone-team-repos: At my team, we use GitHub Teams to help organize our organization’s many repositories. On top of that, my team in particular is responsible for up to ten times more repositories than other, more focused teams. I wanted a way to pull down a bunch of repositories without all the manual git clones that would’ve otherwise been involved. So I spun up an extension for the GitHub CLI to help me with this. It’s a little ugly, but it works! My first iteration was in Ruby; I rewrote it in Bash for better portability.
Someday I want to look at another rewrite in the Bubble Tea TUI framework for Go, just for fun. In the meantime, it does exactly what I needed, and could be useful for onboarding to others.
One more broad change–most of our code bases at work use dev containers, but I did begin using mise-en-place to manage my Rubies, Nodes, and even environment configurations. I’ve been really happy with it so far.
I know these aren’t Ruby-specific tools, but I hope some of you find them helpful or inspirational!
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