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Created September 14, 2016 22:52
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Keeping your Development Environment Current
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keep-dev-env-current.md

Keeping your Development Environment Current

Presented at the Boulder Ruby meetup

  1. Learn to install your full stack from scratch
  • Don't use any 'out of the box' auto install all the things scripts
  • Even if your workplace/school provides a machine all ready to go, you still want to do this for your own growth and understanding

  1. Know each component so you can update it

  2. Don't be afraid to start from scratch and do it all over again. Practice!

  3. Document the process you take with exact commands, making note of any issues you ran into

  • Make this a gist or put it somewhere you can access if you lose access to your machine
  1. Check for updates on a regular basis
  • I strive for 2x a year but monthly is more ideal
  • Try not to get too far behind on major releases of important elements in your stack
  • It'll become easier if you do it more often
  1. Search for new guides or posts on how others are doing this
  • Look them over to see if there are any new or better ways that are new to you
  • Check the date of the material, OS version, any other significant factors like CPU architecture
  • Try to understand each step and how they may differ from ways you already know
  • Develop a dev sense of when someone's guiding you down the wrong path
  1. Be careful with major version upgrades
  • Search for potential issues or incompatibilities especially around OS versions or major framework upgrades
  • Consider if you should delay some part of the upgrade
  • Give yourself more than enough time to complete upgrade in case things go wrong
  • Back up your system so you can restore if you need to abort
  • Don't do this just before you have something important you need your machine for such as speaking at an event, giving some high profile demo to a client, performing some technical process that needs to be done on your machine

Posts for Discussion and Reference

http://www.startae.com/blog/keep-your-mac-development-environment-up-to-date

http://www.createdbypete.com/articles/ruby-on-rails-development-setup-for-mac-osx/

https://gorails.com/setup/osx/10.11-el-capitan

https://gist.github.com/mcls/3118518

https://github.com/nicolashery/mac-dev-setup https://github.com/nicolashery/mac-dev-setup/tree/2.0

Extra Credit

As a challenging but potentiall rewarding exercise, automate parts of the upgrade process once you're comfortable with each piece

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