Introduction
Missing
still work in progress
A template is a recipe with variables. It is the simplest form of personal productivity automation and it functions to reduce highly repetitive textual work. Be it documents, configuration files, pieces of codes or what have you. Fortunately, there is a sufficiently high number of productive lazy people writing meta-frameworks that allow the even lazier ones to automate their tedious writing tasks in simple ways.
One such framework is the python based Cookiecutter Project Templates package which makes it very easy and straightforward to start and work with not only python projects, but all sorts of text based projects by using templates. As noted above Cookiecutter is far from the only template system and a few other project are listed in the links below. There is a cookiecutter-in-a-jiffy introduction and relevant links here.
Text-based templates are a perfect match with software versioning systems (git), source code repositories (GitHub,GitLab) and corresponding workflow / pipeline engines which increases the level of automation even further.