I really recommend getting comfortable with make -- if you know just enough to be dangerous (PHONY targets, regular targets, ifeq, ?=), it can be an incredibly useful tool, and unify control/operations across projects.

The complexity/required reading that comes with integrating ~5+ individual tools and libraries you have to be aware of across one language can be made a lot easier by using make to do the plumbing between these tools.

Often I find that I need to do some of the following:

- do just a tiny bit of pre-processing

- use two disparate tools which might interact/have an ordering requirement

- alias a simple command for a repetitive task

And it's the case that:

- The tools/libraries I'm using don't have the functionality built in

- I'm not excited about writing a bash script

- A <programming language> script/build-hook feels too heavy

I find that Makefiles are a really good way to boil down and standardize my builds across projects.

Here's a chunk from a somewhat recent project:

    psql: export DB_CONTAINER_NAME=$(shell $(KUBECTL) get pods -n $(K8S_NAMESPACE) -l component=db -o=name | head -n 1)
    psql:
     $(KUBECTL) exec -it $(DB_CONTAINER_NAME) -n $(K8S_NAMESPACE) psql -- --user $(DB_USER)

And another that's a bit less trendy:

    image: check-tool-docker
     $(DOCKER) build \
     -f infra/docker/Dockerfile \
     -t ${IMAGE_FULL_NAME_SHA} \
     .

    image-publish: check-tool-docker
     $(DOCKER) push ${IMAGE_FULL_NAME_SHA}

    image-release:
     $(DOCKER) tag $(IMAGE_FULL_NAME_SHA) $(IMAGE_FULL_NAME)
     $(DOCKER) push $(IMAGE_FULL_NAME)

And earlier in the file is the actual language-specific stuff:

    lint: check-tool-yarn
     $(YARN) lint

Yeah, all I'm doing is just calling through to yarn here but the nice thing is that `lint` is a pretty common target from project to project, so most places `make lint` will do what I think it is going to do.

And if you're wondering what the check-tool-<x> targets are like:

    check-tool-yarn:
    ifeq (,$(shell which $(YARN)))
     $(error "yarn not installed (see https://yarnpkg.com)")
    endif

I will warn that there are people with Makefile PTSD, but I am finding a lot of value from it these days, would encourage people to take a look. If you're really ready for some fun check out recursive make -- managing and orchestrating subprojects is really really easy (and you don't have to care what the sub project is written in at the top level).