Someday, I might write a book with this title (PG wannabe?,maybe), but I will spit out my thoughts regardless here first.
My old man drives a Toyota Highlander, which has been super reliable machine. It has been with us for many years now, and it is still going strong. I learned driving on that car, and I have a lot of memories with it.
Since the beginning of the year, I have been watching car reviews on Youtube, particularly the ones from The Car Care Nut.
He is a Toyota & Lexus mechanic and he is a pretty chill dude. (Comment section calls him AMD, so I will stick to that). AMD doesn’t do any fancy editing, and he is not trying to sell you anything. He just talks about cars, and he is pretty good at it. In plain english too, AMD tells you what is good and what is bad about the car. If I learned anything all those review videos from his channel and others, Toyotas are pretty reliable, they can run for hundreds thousands of miles, and they are easy to maintain, but they are boring and simple cars.
The simplicity of the machine makes it easy to maintain, and easy to fix and kinda unbreakable.
My mate has one. 560 000km 4.2 diesel. I changed the timing belt and it is mechanically simple to work on. No special tools required. It is the epitome of “simplicity is the cornerstone of robustness”. - Some random comment on Land Cruiser video from AMD’s channel.
I think the same can be said about Makefiles. Makefiles are simple, boring, and reliable. They are not fancy, but they are robust.
All the nix systems comes with make, and a Makefile feels like a bare bone Toyota. It is simple, and it is reliable. It is not fancy, but it gets the job done.
Tooling and systems should be simple & boring enough to disappear in your journey, so that you can enjoy the view.