Okay, so "bane" might be a bit strong, but I've always worked hard to steer clear of build tools and I wanted to share why. Then, perhaps, how.

A decades ago…

Some 15 years ago, I was a full time Perl programmer building for the web. The development process that our team (of sometimes 6, sometimes 20 developers) was pretty prehistoric compared to today's process.

For example, we used CVS (having moved from RCS and eventually the company would get to SVN). Committing our changes on release day was a nightmare: we'd have to shout "I've got a commit lock on company_m.cgi", and until we had finished adding all the commits, no one else could commit that file. But I digress…

Notes

I'm split into two types of people: one who loves to geek out on tech, and one that just doesn't care about the tech and wants to create something.

I've got a friend who spends ages researching software and trying out different applications to solve a specific task. He gets really into it. My dad is similar. He'll geek out over PCs, Raspberry PIs, the tech and the process.

This is cool. I find myself in this land a lot more, but I kind want to progress to the next stage where I'm creative and solve problems, rather than focusing on the tool, I focus on the product.

Drafts may be incomplete or entirely abandoned, so please forgive me. If you find an issue with a draft, or would like to see me write about something specifically, please try raising an issue.