2 posts tagged with "dotfiles"

For months, I was haunted by a ghost in my machine. My i3 config, which I had carefully crafted, was behaving erratically. Scripts that were supposed to run on startup would sometimes fail. Worse, a hideous black-and-white noise screensaver would randomly appear, despite my explicit commands to disable it. I had gotten so used to the randomness that I accepted it as a fact of life.

Today, that ended. The culprit was found, and it's a lesson in how seemingly harmless "convenience" features can wreak havoc in a minimal environment.

The Problem: Shell Scripts are the Wild West​

For too long, shell scripts lived in the "wild west" of software development. You either drew your gun first and shot cleanly, or someone shot you first. There was no middle ground, no safety net, no way to know if your changes would break production until they already had.

Our dotfiles were no exception. A single wrong conditional statement could break shell loading for every developer, leaving them unable to work. The cost of mistakes was astronomical, and testing was... well, non-existent.