I’ve written before about Howard Abrams’ posts on Literate DevOps and his very nice video illustrating the techniques. As I mentioned in the video post, we can all benefit from these ideas in our day-to-day work.
Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder offers a fine example of this. He has taken the long and error prone process of provisioning a development machine and turned it into a Literate DevOps process. You can, if you like, download his complete setup from GitHub but his process is necessarily idiosyncratic. In the first place, it’s for OS X. In the second, it’s targeted, as it must be, at the type of applications that he needs for his work.
Even if you aren’t using a Mac and your workflow is completely different from Rettke’s, you can use his file as a framework for your own. Besides setting up your own machine(s), Rettke’s ideas would be very useful for setting up standard development machines for your shop. Individual engineers would doubtless want to tweak things to their liking but at least everyone will have the same base system and all the needed tools.
I really like these kind of articles. They always give me ideas for simplifying my own work and indulging my innate laziness. Read over his file and take away what works for you. Org mode is a wonderful thing and we should leverage it as much as we can.