notjames/gist:0f0d5160b262ea75fd755f183811a400

## gistfile1.txt
I'm extremely frustrated.

I worked on our helmfile POC about eight months ago. I got working for a subset of charts we use; roughly six out of about
40 charts. That POC took me about two weeks to get done. In my opinion, that was too long for six charts but I was pleased
with the outcome at the time and I chalked up the time to having never worked with helmfile before.

After the successful POC, I moved on and put the project on the back burner until we could get more time to develop it
fully. So, now I'm circling back to this project. Trying to understand how I got helmfile to work for the POC is
unintuitive, complicated, and not at all DRY even though I used the recommended ways to DRY out our helmfile project at the
time with extensive help from the maintainer for which I was truly grateful and still am. However, it is my opinion that
applications should never be this complicated or diffuclt to understand and helmfile is very complicated for advanced projects. I get it, too. Helmfile is trying to merge and disambiguate potentially a lot of information. However, if the maintainer(s) were more prescriptive about how to do support large (or small) projects, the complexity wouldn't be necessary in my estimation.

The documentation is sparse and dense at the same time. Dense with referential information and sparse missing important
use-case examples and samples especially for advanced configuration. In other words, the basics of helmfile seem to be well
documented for small projects. If you want to do a large or advanced project with multiple environments and actual DRY code,
good luck!! The documentation which attempts to go over the different use-cases, directory structures, exceptions, examples
are sprawled across many, many github issues which link to other issues, which link to other issues. Trying to maintain
context between all the linked issues is cognitive overload and if you're on a timetable forget about it!

I really want to use helmfile for our project because there's really not anything else out there which uses yaml and is as
feature rich as helmfile as far as I've found.
	I'm extremely frustrated.

	I worked on our helmfile POC about eight months ago. I got working for a subset of charts we use; roughly six out of about
	40 charts. That POC took me about two weeks to get done. In my opinion, that was too long for six charts but I was pleased
	with the outcome at the time and I chalked up the time to having never worked with helmfile before.

	After the successful POC, I moved on and put the project on the back burner until we could get more time to develop it
	fully. So, now I'm circling back to this project. Trying to understand how I got helmfile to work for the POC is
	unintuitive, complicated, and not at all DRY even though I used the recommended ways to DRY out our helmfile project at the
	time with extensive help from the maintainer for which I was truly grateful and still am. However, it is my opinion that
	applications should never be this complicated or diffuclt to understand and helmfile is very complicated for advanced projects. I get it, too. Helmfile is trying to merge and disambiguate potentially a lot of information. However, if the maintainer(s) were more prescriptive about how to do support large (or small) projects, the complexity wouldn't be necessary in my estimation.

	The documentation is sparse and dense at the same time. Dense with referential information and sparse missing important
	use-case examples and samples especially for advanced configuration. In other words, the basics of helmfile seem to be well
	documented for small projects. If you want to do a large or advanced project with multiple environments and actual DRY code,
	good luck!! The documentation which attempts to go over the different use-cases, directory structures, exceptions, examples
	are sprawled across many, many github issues which link to other issues, which link to other issues. Trying to maintain
	context between all the linked issues is cognitive overload and if you're on a timetable forget about it!

	I really want to use helmfile for our project because there's really not anything else out there which uses yaml and is as
	feature rich as helmfile as far as I've found.