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by mr_mitm 992 days ago
When you spend eight hours coding on your work computer, you make lots of little tweaks to improve workflow. If you then do nearly no coding on your home computer, it's unlikely that you will perform the same tweaks. I try to keep my systems set up almost identically, but that's a lot of work. (I now try to use ansible for that but after playing around for a bit I'm having doubts if it was the right choice. Keeping everything in sync is not exactly ergonomic.)

Some particular quirk of autocompletion could become almost pure muscle memory, and if it's suddenly missing, you notice.
2 comments
turboponyy 992 days ago
It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

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grepfru_it 991 days ago
Work computer is windows with wsl, home computer is Ubuntu. Work computer I need to develop in IntelliJ and vscode. At home I can use copilot or local LLMs, at work I cannot (nor several other useful extensions) At work I use maven and I have to spend 15minutes dinking with project settings anytime I need to compile a new project. At home I have admin privs, at work it’s a set of hoops to get temporary admin access so I forgo things like system environment variables.

I am skeptical that nix or home manager would solve these problems. So I just have a specific setup at work, that is typically more advanced and automated than my home system. My leet code interviews suffer because of this. Just makes me realize that coding interviews using an environment that does not mimic the workplace is just excluding senior developers (read: old people) who don’t have the time or patience to jump through these hoops for 15minutes of placating a recently hired college grad

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lijok 991 days ago
Nix evangelists should seriously consider putting the breaks on advertising Nix until its horrible UX is fixed. I’m struggling to even discuss Nix as an option at work because every engineer I bring it up to has had bad first impressions.
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metabeard 992 days ago
Anecdotal comment: Check out Chezmoi. Its worked really well for me.
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mr_mitm 992 days ago
Thanks, I never heard of it before and it looks really interesting.

However, it seems that it does not cover all of my needs: https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/discussions/1510#discussi...

Maybe I should use Ansible for system-wide configuration and chezmoi for dotfiles in $HOME.

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gilleain 991 days ago
I read that as the literal letters for like 10 seconds before realising it was French for 'at home'. Made me laugh.
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