Hey Reader,

If I took your laptop right now and threw it into the sea, what would you lose?

How long would it take you to rebuild it?

Not just “I can check email.” I mean your entire environment.

Your editor configured exactly how you like it. Your shell tools. Your SSH keys.

All your personal files restored.

For most engineers the honest answer is days.

I think that’s a problem worth solving.

I apply “cattle versus pets” thinking to everything I do, even my personal workstations.

Everything runs in containers, and every file that matters lives in Git or on my NAS.

This makes my laptop disposable. If it disappears, I run a few scripts and I’m back in 15 minutes.

I call it a stateless workstation. Three principles:

• store all config in version control
• sync data to a remote
• containerized project environments

All of my personal configuration (known as dotfiles) live in a repository that I clone on any machine. Any file or data that I don’t want to lose either lives on a remote storage system or is backed up to another system every hour.

I treat my disk as something that can break any minute.

And the most important part is to always do your work in containerized environments.

This trains you to get used to minimal configuration, using the defaults, rebuilding quickly, and becoming intentional with where you store your data.

And it also means you can work on any machine that has a container runtime available.

It won’t matter if you’re on Windows, MacOS or Linux anymore.

This is what true autonomy looks like.

I just set up a brand new laptop from scratch using this exact workflow and recorded the whole thing.

If you want to see it in action: click here to watch the video​

​

Have a great week,

Mischa

P.S. Later this week I’m sharing something I’ve been working on that I think you’ll find very useful. Keep an eye out.