One Tip a Week: Never Manually Set Up a Dev Machine Again

This week's tip of the week is automated machine setup with dotfiles and scripts.

Stop spending hours manually installing tools every time you get a new machine or need to rebuild. My dotfiles repo automates the entire setup.

What gets automated:

• Shell configuration (aliases, functions, environment variables)

• Homebrew packages and Mac App Store apps

• System preferences

• Git config

Clone the repo, run the install script, grab coffee and boom you’re done.

This is great for new machines, rebuilds, or keeping multiple computers in sync. While dotfiles work on any Unix-like system, my setup includes Mac-specific tooling via Homebrew and mas-cli.

I wrote up the complete walkthrough on my blog if you want to see how it all works and go ahead and fork the repo and make it your own!

That's it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!