The Software Craftsman’s Day One: Why My First Week of Startup Life Had No Business Logic
Being made redundant from a position where I defined patterns and practices for a high-performance team, I decided to take the leap to create my own startup. As I write now, this has felt like a violent acceleration of the clock. One day you feel the safety of an established enterprise; the next, there I am, standing on a clean slate. When I finally received my new laptop last week, I felt the…
After being let go from a high-performance team, the author decided to start their own startup. On the first day of their new venture, they were eager to install software and begin coding. However, their disciplined approach to craftsmanship led them to reject the idea of rushed progress. They learned the importance of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) from previous experiences and decided to apply it to their local development environment.
Faced with the challenge of a damaged laptop, the author spent the first week creating a tool called rig. This lightweight, POSIX-compliant developer toolchain dispatcher and provisioning system was designed to separate hardware from the environment using IaC principles. Rig aimed to be liberating, not confining, and provided a framework for developers to quickly set up their machines consistently.
The author's decision to focus on rig for a full week was not based on conventional wisdom or theoretical concepts. It stemmed from the intense knowledge transfer they experienced during their final months at their previous corporate role. They realized that the bottleneck in onboarding new developers was their local development environment, not the system design itself. Rig aimed to solve this onboarding tax by providing a clear, concise process for setting up a new machine.
Rig's design philosophy prioritized modularity, POSIX compliance, and adherence to XDG configuration standards. By separating language runtimes from tools and storing persistent settings in ~/.config/rig/config, rig offered developers a customizable environment without imposing strict guidelines. The tool also included features such as environment evaluation, language and tool updates, and diagnostic checks to ensure the environment remained consistent.
By implementing rig, the author transformed the onboarding process from weeks of peer-assisted debugging into a much shorter, more efficient task. With rig in place, new developers could get their machines up and running in just a few minutes, minimizing downtime and maximizing productivity. The author's disciplined approach to craftsmanship paid off, enabling them to focus on writing code rather than wrestling with complex local environments.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
