Zero Config

This essay sounds fascinating! Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find it on the public internet…

About, oh, maybe 3 years ago, long before we had company internal blogs, Jacob Gabrielson wrote and circulated a brilliant essay called Zero Config.

via you-should-write-blogs – steveyegge2.

Although the post as-a-whole is fascinating and mostly about blogging, this caught my eye because I have been trying to look at reducing the amount of configuration for my current client. Much config is duplicated, and some is just not worth being config and is more constant; e.g. setting the format for a message seems to make sense in the  configuration until you realise you can never change it after the first message has been written in that format!

Likewise, almost every project and service is built and released in subtly different ways, as each had someone had to be honed to fit a very specific need (if that’s the case, it was done poorly!) – but the result is a package of releases that are hard to automate because little is repeatable, common or shared!

If anyone knows how I might get to see a copy of this essay I’d love to hear about it…

3 thoughts on “Zero Config

  1. Did you have any luck finding it? I read the same post and I’m searching for the essay as well.

  2. I was also interested in the essay, but I fear it’s still within Amazon, considering the following comment of Steve Yegge (in 2006…):

    “I wrote about [a different problem] in my You Should Write Blogs essay back at Amazon, describing an essay my good friend Jacob Gabrielson had written (still Amazon proprietary info, alas, though it wouldn’t hurt them to publish it now.)”
    http://steve-yegge.blogspot.nl/2006/12/i-take-it-all-back-send-me-your-money.html

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