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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3950 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

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My experience is that programming is like 98% fiddling with infrastructure stuff though…

What?

You set up the development environment, repositories and libraries once and don't have to deal with any of that until a non-trivial change / upgrade comes up in a year or two.

No?

It's a one-off thing unless the projects you are working with take no more than 2-3 days to finish.

If you are programming professionally (or on large projects), you might work on the same codebase for years on end.

Depends on what you’re doing.

If you’re doing a bunch of short projects in a row, possibly all using different languages and different frameworks etc, then yeah you’ll feel like you’re spending most of your time doing setup.

On bigger, longer-lived projects, there will be longer stretches of time where the infrastructure “just works” and you can focus on the code.

Ahh that's an interesting point, and does make a lot of sense. Perhaps I just haven't gone deep enough in the past to appreciate the nice side of things. Good to know.

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