X World 2026
25-26 AUGUST • NAARM | MELBOURNE
Stop Losing a Day to Setup
Every terminal sessions drifts. Tool versions creep apart, the setup steps live in someone's head, and a new starter can lose days before anything runs. This talk shows how you can optimise that local environment, check some of it into a repo, while retaining customisation on just your machine. I'll cover pinning tool versions with mise, turning common jobs into shared tasks anyone can run, and keeping secrets off disk with fnox. The examples are from real admin work: mise tasks that wrap Terraform commands to deploy Jamf config, with credentials that never land on the filesystem. You'll leave with patterns you can drop straight into your own team, so everyone gets the same setup every time.
About the presenter
James Smith is a Principal Engineer at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where he looks after the tooling and automation behind around 2000 developer Macs. This is his third time at X World. He spoke on GitHub Actions for Mac admins in 2023, on turning Python scripts into packages in 2024, and co-ran the Next Level AutoPkg workshop that same year. Most of his work is about making Mac management reproducible, from packaging and infrastructure as code through to the local environment developers use every day.
