Your setup is dope, but where's your code?

I have a problem. I have spent more time in the last month setting up and tinkering with an environment for me to code in than I have in actual coding. This is not a good thing, especially for someone who is a total novice like I am who definitely needs to sharpen his skills.

With studies and other stuff eating up most of my time, I have relatively little time to spend to do this thing that I love so much. And I genuinely do love to code. I need to use Workrave to unglue my eyes from the screen from time to time. Sitting down to write a some program to solve some problem or do some task is, for lack of a more fitting term, amazeballs. The time I have is precious to me.

But what I actually end up doing a lot of the time is trying to customize my Vim environment, trying to find tools to code easier, or lint my code, or perform syntax checks, or contemplating dropping Vim altogether and adopt Spacemacs and start all over again.

Now I don’t regret installing and configuring all the bells and whistles I have now (Tmux especially is bloody brilliant!). But I think I could’ve spent that time better. The time I spent reading about Spacemacs layers could have been better spent learning me some Clojure. The time I spent figuring how to auto lint my python code could’ve been by, y’know, actually writing the python code I so desperately want to lint.

So I’m done with the tinkering. I’m putting it to a complete stop because chasing that perfect environment is just a huge time sink that would’ve been for nothing if I find myself wanting to use something else because it looks really cool (Have I mentioned Spacemacs yet?). I’m going to stick to my current toolbox until I actually have some code worthy of all the work I put into that setup.

This being my first blog ever (WOOHOO!). Here’s an obligatory Hello World.

>>> print("Hello, World!")

# "Hello, World!"