To symlink my dotfiles, I use GNU Stow. Most tutorials I have encountered assume you are placing your dotfiles directory at $HOME/dotfiles and thus, the command in that case would be…
stow .
since by default, the target directory is the parent of stow dir.
In my case, I keep my dotfiles directory at /Users/dw/Repos/github.com/donovanwatts/dotfiles so I need to explicitly define home directory as the target using the -t option.
stow -t /Users/dw .