In my experience, I've found that the configuration management aspect of writing software is the least understood and hardest to learn. All the books on learni

In my experience, I've found that the configuration management aspect of writing software is the least understood and hardest to learn. All the books on learning languages I've read just skip it entirely, or provide a default setup with no explanation. Which is somewhat understandable. But then the documentation for various projects also do the same thing. I'm left reading the man pages for various tools that some project says I need and going "Why do I need this?" on a higher level than the man pages. And in my professional life it's much the same. On one project we have one or two people who understand how the system is setup, reject any kind of change or improvement, and just keep throwing bailing wire at it to keep the process going. On my own, partly as a result to institutional intertia, we have an ancient TFS build controller running a powershell script running gulp running webpack running babel, and then deploy it using robocopy to network share in IIS (using iisnode). It's amazing it all works. It often breaks, rarely with the same error. It also takes 10 times as long as building on my local machine.