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README is always the first commit. What is this project? What are its goals?

This seems obvious to me now but it was not obvious when I was younger. I will forget what a project is.



> I will forget what a project is.

I sometimes completely forget what a project is, but I nearly _always_ forget how to build / run / test / deploy it… Now I make sure that simple copy-pastable one-liners for those four steps are included pretty much right after I’ve written my top-level “what is this for” sentence.


This so much. I can pretty easily reverse engineer why me, or some folk on the internet, wrote some code. It might take time, but reading a few files should do it.

The 'effing building or running process and its unwritten dependencies/twirks though? Hell, better rewrite the project from scratch than having to figure out the obscure incantations I used 6 month ago.

I'm so glad our industry heavily pivoted towards package managers with consistent `$ pkgmanager build` processes. I've lost count of the number of times I did not document my Python dependencies when I was younger.


Me too, there's so much accrued knowledge and hard won time recorded for me in my bash install files of my projects




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