In Praise of Tinkering
If you’re reading this, it’s a good bet that you’re a tinkerer like me. I love tweaking and tailoring just about everything I can, to the point that it’s probably confusing that I’m not a Plasma user. To which I say, I believe that form follows function, not that function negates the need for form completely (You can send your complaints to $NAME_OF_OTHER_PODCAST_HOST). Despite being a perfectly defendable position epistemically speaking, I don’t believe that everyone is a bot except me, and instead tend to believe that my fellow developers like to tinker as well, to the point that I’m always rather surprised and a little hurt when I hear others say that they’d rather stick to the beaten path; that they don’t want to customize their operating systems more than they absolutely have to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you’re a bad person if you’ve never felt the desire to make your windows wobbly (@Plasma users), I’m with you there, but I’m not going to subject myself to using bash as my default shell because I have to SSH into servers on at least a weekly basis and am worried about being slightly uncomfortable in this context. It’s a fraction of my time and I’m significantly more productive with the rest of the time using Fish. Not only that, but my comfort with Fish was what encouraged me to dive deeper into shell scripting; something I had previously tried to avoid to a fault, writing ridiculous python scripts that could have been implemented trivially with a handful of pipes in a one-liner.
This is a common manifestation of the most frequently cited reasons I see given against tinkering: the fear of losing the fruits of ones labor, be it because one has been forced into a situation of using a stock system, such as in the case of the aforementioned SSH session, or from data loss, such as after setting up a new OS. To the former I say, don’t copy-paste configs if you don’t know what they do. Any tinkering you do ought to be done reversibly, i.e. that you only do it if you at least generally understand what you’ve done and how your modified configuration differs from the original, and have some kind of version control in place (More on that below). Don’t remap “:” to “;” if you’re worried that you won’t be able to remember how to use vanilla vi.
To the people worried about losing their configurations, this is a little more understandable as it requires some actual effort to rectify, but not much. There are a myriad of solutions available for not only backing up your configurations (also known as “dotfiles” because they’re frequently stored in hidden files and directories), such as GNU Stow or (my personal favorite) Dotdrop. You can also write installation scripts for the parts that can’t be handled by symlinking dotfiles from a git repo. I have a small collection for mine, and GitHub has an entire page dedicated to the documenting some of the most masterful dotfile setups. Even if you aren’t a DevOps engineer, maintaining a git repo and drafting a few shell scripts isn’t bad practice of the kinds of hard skills that every developer needs.
Finally, I’d like to address the idea of our machines being mere tools, disposable if anything goes wrong. I completely agree with the latter half of this sentiment. I don’t know if I should be admitting this, but I tend to hose my machine at least once or twice a year. I do something so incredibly stupid that I either have to completely reinstall the OS, or worse, I’ve accidentally deleted it while trying to reformat another partition or something. It used to be a horrific event, with repercussions rippling outward days into the future as I slaved over restoring every bit back to its proper place, clicking checkboxes and re-downloading installers. Now, everything I need is backed up onto multiple media in multiple physical locations and my current configuration is a shell script away. I could throw my computer into a lake and be able to pretend like nothing ever happened within a couple of hours. My computer has been effectively disposable for the past year and a half now, and tinkering with configuration management is the reason why.
To the people who want to see their machines as mere tools, I say they already are. They always have been! They’re functionally-equivalent to a hammer in the grand scheme of things. The only difference being that instead of providing mechanical leverage, their’s is computational. As an implementation, they’re actually worse than their physical counterparts. If you’ve ever handled old tools, you’ll have noticed how they wear. Their handles erode in such a way that your hand fits them perfectly. They’ve been sculpted over years of use. Computers, namely operating systems, don’t exhibit such a property. Without the effort, their sharp edges will remain as sharp as they day they were compiled until the bit rot finally breaks them. They’re almost brittle in this regard. We can smooth those edges though, with a little effort and a bit of tinkering.
Since we’re all stuck inside for an indeterminate length of time into the future, use some of it to sand some sharp edges. Try a new shell! Make some aliases for frequently-used commands! Write a program that nags you when you inevitably don’t use them for the first few weeks! Ruminate about why you didn’t do this sooner!
But above all, stay safe. We’ll see you on the other side.
#andràtuttobene 🇮🇹