Setting Up a New Mac for Development

Some people pride themselves on how many months they can reach in uptime, which leads to an ever-present dread of major software updates. Some people take it upon themselves to carefully configure and fine-tune the most trivial minutiae, which makes the idea of starting from a fresh operating system install an increasingly terrifying proposition. Some people have been using the same backup series for fifteen years, dragging untold corrupted files and buggy preferences from computer to computer in perpetuity.Not me.I aim for each of my computers to be as disposable as possible. If my system starts feeling slow or buggy or otherwise unreliable, I want to be able to wipe it and start fresh without losing days of productivity and without any lingering doubt that an important file or program failed to make the transition. That means minimizing manual customizations while automating as much as possible to get set up quickly. The trick is in striking the right balance: time-saving settings should be taken advantage of wherever the defaults are genuinely bad, and automation should be kept minimal enough that it doesn’t itself become a vector for carrying forward bugs from one install to the next.