Chances are, you won't spend the next ten years using the same computer. It's also possible you have multiple machines you work across—so you should probably find a way to synchronize your configuration files across multiple environments.
As usual, there's no single right way to do this, but a common practice is to store files in a Git repository (often called dotfiles, since configuration files in Linux tend to start with a dot), and pointing symlinks from the files in the home directory to the files in the dotfiles directory. All you'll have to do is commit, push, and pull the configuration with Git on each machine to stay up to date.
The easiest way would probably be to create a repository using a service such as GitHub, and utilize it to synchronize your configuration. Just don't store any sensitive information...