Digital mise en place
Posted onIn the kitchen, you do your mise en place before you start cooking. You gather, measure and prepare your ingredients in advance, so that when the food hits the pan, it’s all you focus on. You’re not chopping a cup of red peppers while the garlic is burning, or learning that you’re out of cream halfway through the recipe.
Automation is digital mise en place. Once you’re in the flow, your scripts, shortcuts and hotkeys keep you in the flow. You’re not looking for your files or trying to remember the right commands.
Examples
I created a few commands that let me jump between projects. They put me in the right directory, set environment variables and open development tools, all with a few keystrokes. aab -s is a lot shorter than cd ~/Documents/Projects/AllAboutBerlin/server && docker-compose up --build -d && cd ../site && ursus -wfs. It’s also a lot easier to remember.
I created equivalent aliases in my SSH config. ssh aab is equivalent to ssh -PXXXX root@allaboutberlin.com.
This lets me reboot an old project without the dread of figuring out how to run it. There’s a script in there that does it, and it’s one of the first things explained in the README.
These tools save a few seconds here and there, sure, but above all, they help me stay focused on my main task.