[JohnMakin]

I compare it to a project I worked on when I was very junior a very long time ago - I built by hand this complicated harness of scripts to deploy VM's on bare metal and do stuff like create customizable, on-the-fly test environments for the devs on my team. It worked fine, but it was a massive time sink, lots of code, and was extremely difficult to maintain and could have weird behavior or bad assumptions quite often.

I made it because at that point in my career I simply didn't know that ansible existed, or cloud solutions that were very cheap to do the same thing. I spent a crazy amount of effort doing something that ansible probably could have done for me in an afternoon. That's what sometimes these projects feel like to me. It's kind of like a solution looking for a problem a lot of the time.

I just scanned through the front page of the show HN page and quickly eyeballed several of these type of things.

[dormento]

Yeah, the feeling that hits when you finally realize you spent THIS MUCH EFFORT in a problem and you realize you can do more with less.

> I made it because at that point in my career I simply didn't know that ansible existed

Channels Mark Twain. "Sorry for such a long letter, i didn't have the time to make it shorter."

[skydhash]

This is why I make it a goal to have a very good knowledge about the tools I use. So many problems, can be solved by piping a few unix tools together or have a whole chapter in the docs (emacs, vim, postgres,…) about how to solve it.

I write software when the scripts are no longer suitable.