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

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

#11

Post by jakevoytko »

* Editor support for every language you use:

Syntax highlighting. Look up documentation at callsite. Jump to definition. Run a test from the editor. Debug executables from within the editor. Fuzzy find file by name (for instance, typing "pluginfancymixi" should turn up something at "project/Plugins/third_party/username/project_name/fancy_mixin.language"). Third-party plugin support. Ability to have per-repo configurations

* Searching code:

Should be faster than grepping a bunch of directories. Supports wildcard searching. Bonus: tooling support for finding identifiers, callsites, usages, etc

* Development environment:

Any executable or test can run in one step (zero if possible). If possible, should be able to run multiple instances of your app at once. For example, I should be able to leave a webserver running so that my code reviewer can test it without pulling the branch

* Team environment:

Small PRs. Quick reviews. Tuned balance between senior and junior engineers. Should have enough senior engineers that they don't feel overwhelmed by the mentorship+training part of their job.

Edited: formatting

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

#12

Post by CyanLite4 »

I don’t know about you guys, but .NET Core (c#) and Visual Studio along with Blazor on the front end and deploying on Linux is pretty darn cool and highly productive. I haven’t had much success getting as productive on Python, Golang, or Node. Blazor eats TypeScript for lunch. Sometimes people confuse complexity for productivity. You can’t tell me installing 60,000 NPM packages just to have one dependency break is your idea of fun.

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

#13

Post by aphextron »

CyanLite4 wrote: post #12

I don’t know about you guys, but .NET Core (c#) and Visual Studio along with Blazor on the front end and deploying on Linux is pretty darn cool and highly productive. I haven’t had much success getting as productive on Python, Golang, or Node. Blazor eats TypeScript for lunch. Sometimes people confuse complexity for productivity. You can’t tell me installing 60,000 NPM packages just to have one dependency break is yo…

Are people really using Blazor in production? What does your build pipeline look like? What dependencies/frameworks are you using?

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

#14

Post by Cthulhu_ »

rb808 wrote: post #8

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.

There's a time and place for a full-stack developer like you mention, but I feel like there's an expectation that they should also be a hyperproductive 10X developer then.

I've seen and worked with people that have that ability, but in practice you see that they're going too fast and miss things like documentation, testing, or even basic architecture.

I mean yeah great that you could knock out some microservices, but they're undocumented nodejs services with a postgres database that communicate with each other using REST / JSON and there's nothing in the way of tracing or logging or status monitoring yet. Why not start with a monolith first in a sane language?

But by the time that question had come up, the guy already moved on to something better paying, lol.

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

#15

Post by dls2016 »

CyanLite4 wrote: post #12

I don’t know about you guys, but .NET Core (c#) and Visual Studio along with Blazor on the front end and deploying on Linux is pretty darn cool and highly productive. I haven’t had much success getting as productive on Python, Golang, or Node. Blazor eats TypeScript for lunch. Sometimes people confuse complexity for productivity. You can’t tell me installing 60,000 NPM packages just to have one dependency break is yo…

I'm also highly interested in any other information about your setup!

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

#16

Post by coldcode »

gunniho wrote: post #5
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.

Or... any project requirements that are clear.

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

#17

Post by vbsteven »

I really like my current technology stack which combines stable technology (Java, Spring, Postgres) with some modern cloud-native touches like Spring Boot, Docker and Kubernetes.

Basically any new project (unless requirements show that it needs something else but 90% is OK) starts out as a Java or Kotlin Spring Boot project with a Postgres database. This is super easy to setup locally, provides most things out of the box and the Java/Maven ecosystem has stable libraries for everything else.

When it's time to deploy this I package the project as a Docker container, write a Kubernetes yml config and I'm good to go on most cloud providers.

I focus mostly on making sure there is as little difference as possible between me clicking "Run" in the IDE, and the packaged project running in Docker. Usually the only differences are ENV variables for configuring database and other dependant services.

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

#18

Post by dnautics »

CyanLite4 wrote: post #12

I don’t know about you guys, but .NET Core (c#) and Visual Studio along with Blazor on the front end and deploying on Linux is pretty darn cool and highly productive. I haven’t had much success getting as productive on Python, Golang, or Node. Blazor eats TypeScript for lunch. Sometimes people confuse complexity for productivity. You can’t tell me installing 60,000 NPM packages just to have one dependency break is yo…

How does blazor deal with the situation if one client accidentally or maliciously triggers code that eats up CPU?

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

#20

Post by marcuskaz »

Ideal experience:

1. I write code in an editor, it auto lints and formats to standards of project.

2. On save, whatever is needed to build and test is automatically run.

3. After repeat 1-2 and ready, commit code and create pull request.

4. On commit, integration tests run and one-off environment to smoke test is created.

5. On accepted review and merged, auto deploy to production or next release.

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