1-liner setup for your development environment


ydev setup <anything>

I did an informal poll at Yahoo, and also with candidates who interview with Yahoo.

When they join a new team, how long did it take to setup their dev environment.  It ranges from 30 minutes to a day, and even several days.

I asked them what if I pour water on their dev box, how much effort would it take to setup their environment again.

Usually people looked at me like I was crazy, and then they say 1/2 day, and they have to look up a twiki page, or some notes.

The effort I am pushing for at Yahoo is for any dev env to have a single line of setup, to install, verify it works, and takes less than 1 hour.

This tool would track

  • how many developers install it
  • how many failures, successes
  • how long it took

My team and I built the ydev tool that does exactly that.  We love it and so do many others.