Yes, Make is awesome. I use it for so many things. It's a great way to automate tasks. For example my personal website is built using a Makefile that calls bash

Yes, Make is awesome. I use it for so many things. It's a great way to automate tasks. For example my personal website is built using a Makefile that calls bash scripts to rebuild the updated web pages, and I deploy it using a git push to my server and a git hook there that calls Make. However there are files that I don't want to put into the Git repository because they are blobs that may change often like PDFs of my teaching materials. It's okay, I have an "uploads" target in my Makefile that will upload only the modified PDFs to my server and this target is a dependency of the "deploy" target which does the git push so I don't even have to think about it. Also the updated PDFs for my courses materials are automatically put into my websites source tree by another Makefile that I use to manage and build my teaching materials and which let me either build the PDFs I use from my LaTeX sources or build from the same sources alternate versions of the materials for my students (without solutions to the lab sessions exercises for example) and automatically publish those to my local website version to be uploaded whenever I want to deploy the updated website. It's kind of Makefiles all the way down. I like Makefiles! =)