Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#1

Post by asim » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 11:56 AM UTC

Today software development looks pretty fragmented and complex depending on what angle you're coming at it from. I've spent the past decade building web apps, distributed systems, infrastructure and all sorts. My feeling is that as a developer there is still so much that stands in my way getting from some local piece of software to something that runs and scales in "production". I'm starting to rethink this from first principles and curious to know what others deem as the ideal developer experience for 2020.

Share your thoughts!

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#2

Post by SamuelAdams » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

Project requirements that have a clear definition of done and do not change every other day.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#3

Post by franciscop » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

While it is "fragmented" nowadays, many one of these branches are larger than the mainstream 10-15 years back, especially when it comes to learning resources and tooling. There has never been a better moment to learn or do programming than now IMHO.

In the same way, something hacked together by your average developer now is a lot more stable than some "production" run 10-15 years ago, even if it's just because of the quality of the infrastructure that exists.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#4

Post by na85 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 1:44 PM UTC

I contribute to an open source project written in C# that was previously windows-only. When dotnet core came out, I led the effort to port the project to Linux, using Emacs and omnisharp-roslyn which offers intellisense-style code completion via company-mode.

Emacs+C#+omnisharp is pretty darn close to my ideal development experience. My Emacs config is not particularly long nor particularly involved, and in fact one could replicate my C# setup with less than 10 lines of config code.

Highly recommend.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#5

Post by gunniho » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

SamuelAdams wrote: post #2

Project requirements that have a clear definition of done and do not change every other day.

Or... Projects requirements that have a clear definition of outcome and change ever other day based on data.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#6

Post by kls » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

Careful what you wish for development in the 70's, 80's and the beginning of the 90's was fragmented and we had a wealth of systems and languages to dive into and explore. Then Windows dominated the desktop, Linux ate the server world and Java went on to dominate most non-system level software development. It went from a great time to be a developer to an extremely mundane task. Today we have captured some of that back, but it is not like it was. Fragmentation also means choices and choices to explore.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#7

Post by hcarvalhoalves » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

Look at Symbolics Genera and be sad nothing similar exists today, 30 years later.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#8

Post by rb808 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

Agreed the typical environment is horrible. Seems to be the best way is to try to work on something really high level or low level. IE use some framework like RoR to solve business problems, or a low level library to do something interesting. It feels like everyone should be doing front end, back end, k8s, ML at the same time but its just asking to fail.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#9

Post by growlist » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #3

While it is "fragmented" nowadays, many one of these branches are larger than the mainstream 10-15 years back, especially when it comes to learning resources and tooling. There has never been a better moment to learn or do programming than now IMHO. In the same way, something hacked together by your average developer now is a lot more stable than some "production" run 10-15 years ago, even if it's just because of the…

I was aspiring to skill up my JavaScript this year and after a few hundred hours have ended up pretty demoralised, realising that the amount of learning required to be a good JS dev in 2020 (at least where I am working atm) seems enormous, and to be frank I'm too old to be wanting to put in evenings and weekends merely to remain competitive. As a consequence I suspect I may well seek to switch back into support, presales or consultancy, all of which I've done in previous roles, and which seem to be somewhat less competitive than straight dev but still rewarding and reasonably remunerated. Overall my feeling is that unless you're pretty rockstar-ish the cost/benefit of being a dev just simply doesn't pay off in 2020, at least here in the UK.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

#10

Post by quantummkv » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

For me, PHP is still ideal developer experience, even after a decade of working with it.

The language has evolved tastefully without breaking away from the past in drastic(pythonic) ways. Frameworks like Laravel still continue to evolve in a rapid pace than its contemporaries in other languages, bringing in support for every new advancement like webpack, OAuth, etc.

Text editor support is also rapidly accelerating with LSP as a part of the core runtime. PHPStorm is still a beast of an IDE. Composer is in many ways an ideal package manager, a cross between the ease of bundler and local package scoping of npm.

The runtime evolves at a rapid pace, with performance improvements in every release and the upcoming JIT.

Most importantly, the development and deployment story of PHP is still easy as ever. Unlike other modern stacks that require arcane version manager, virtual environments, docker layers, etc, the LAMP stack is still the one script environment creator that requires nothing more than a working Linux distro. The WAMP one click installer still works on Windows without any Subsystems.