Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into
Makefiles. I always dismissed them as a C compiler thing. Something that could never be useful for Python programming. But nowadays every project I create has a Makefile to bind together all task involved on that project. From bootstrapping the dev environment, running checks/test, starting a devserver, building releases and container images. Makefiles are just such a nice place to put scripts for these common tasks compared to normal shell scripts. The functional approach and dependency resolving of Make allows you to express them with minimal boilerplate and you get tab completion for free.
Sometimes I try to take more native solutions (eg. Tox, docker) but I always end up wrapping those tools in a Makefile somewhere forthe road since there are always missing links and because Make is ubiquitous on nearly every Linux and macOS it is just all you need to get a project started.Example: https://gitlab.com/internet-cleanup-foundation/web-security-...Running the 'make' command in this repo will setup all requirements and then run code checks and tests. Running it again will skip the setup part unless one of the dependency files has changed (or the setup env is removed).