If you want instant 10x engineer aura, then you need to have your local development setup fully automated¹.

In this post, I’ll provide a comprehensive walk-through of how I automated my MacBook setup and my general philosophy around developer productivity.

I have three repositories that facilitate my local development setup / productivity:

1. nickolashkraus/dotfiles: My personal dotfiles
2. nickolashkraus/bash-scripts: A collection of helpful Bash scripts
3. nickolashkraus/nhk-mac: A CLI for quickly setting up a new macOS workstation

nhk-mac is the core application², which utilizes bash-scripts and dotfiles for configuration.

To setup a new macOS workstation, all I have to do is:

1. Open Terminal.

2. Download the zip file.

curl -L https://github.com/nickolashkraus/nhk-mac/archive/master.zip -o nhk-mac.zip
unzip -q nhk-mac.zip
mv nhk-mac-master nhk-mac
rm nhk-mac.zip
cd nhk-mac

3. Run nhk-mac.

./nhk-mac

This application does the following:

• Checks System Integrity Protection (SIP) status (yabai requires SIP to be disabled)
• Sets hostname
• Configures keyboard
• Configures Dock
• Configures System Settings
• Installs Xcode
• Installs Homebrew
• Installs Homebrew packages
• Installs Oh My Zsh
• Installs vim-plug
• Installs Powerline Fonts
• Generates SSH keys
• Sets up workspace
• Installs Java
• Installs Python
• Sets up virtualenv
• Installs nickolashkraus/bash-scripts
• Installs nickolashkraus/dotfiles
• Installs Vim plugins
• Installs fzf
• Installs yabai
• Installs skhd
• Configures GUI applications

In a few weeks, I am starting a new job, so I can’t wait to use this on a new machine and to start being productive from day one.