These days it’s hard to conceive of life without the internet. We have come a long way since the early days of the internet as a hobbyist’s retreat full of text bulletin boards and personal “web logs”. People now rely on the internet to pay bills, shop for necessities and even earn an income. The world is at your fingertips… if you can use a mouse… and see the screen… and hear the audio.

As a beginner developer working on pet projects at home, it’s easy to argue that once code goes through the compiler, it’s all the same. Right? The flaw in this argument is that it assumes that all software developers do is write new code. The reality is that we actually spend much more time reading and modifying existing code than writing new code.

Jeff Atwood once famously proclaimed “we are typists first, programmers second”. While I think software development is a little more complicated than that, this quote brings up an important point: efficiency in software development hinges on the tooling we choose. For the longest time I used Bash as my UNIX shell. It got the job done. I would occasionally feel frustrated by a repetitive command or a missing feature, but there was usually an alias or script I could apply like a bandaid to minimize the pain enough to keep going. I even switched to iTerm several years back to improve my terminal emulator GUI. I worked with Bash for long enough that I managed to amass a pretty fancy .bash_profile config. If you’re curious about my config, you can check it out for yourself.