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

Nobody ever seems to remark on how most UIs these days manage to be incredibly complex compared to how often they crash. Whereas if you look at older software or OS GUIs, the simplicity is astounding while still having more crashes. The point being that despite the bad rap that frontend dev gets, it’s actually made progress on the UI development front that is pretty much unrecognized.

We just started from scratch a new project in February, pulling out lots of experience between to fairly veteran developers and trying to put together a “reasonable best practice modern stack”, so to speak.

I fundamentally couldn’t agree more that it’s a shitshow right now. Everything could be better. Namely:

- Typescript + monorepos is a total pain in the ass

- react-native-web is the way to write apps if you want to go cross platform, but there’s a ton of sharp edges and no great UI library to write components more cleanly

- Still no great, obvious state management system for frontend

- We’ve been gluing together a setup for Kubernetes, docker compose (locally), and CI/CD on GitHub. It’s a ton of code even while keeping it simple. Too much to list here. We’re using Rio for some of it, which starts to get some of the DX better

- Hasura and graphql and then on the frontend the biggest upgrade I’ve had in years is gqless (https://gqless.dev). It’s a bit early, needs a lot of work, but fully typed queries are just incredible

- Just endless amounts of cross browser issues, polyfills necessary for various browsers

- Obviously tons of time spent getting webpack to play along.

- Getting your tests to work just like they would in the browser took us quite a lot of iteration, we use a wide variety of testing tools that took time to figure out

Honestly, it’s all bad. The bright spots are Chrome dev tools, React Refresh, gqless, Hasura, and our UI kit which is building on react native but adds components ala SwiftUI (VStack, HStack, etc) that then statically extract to css at compile time.

I do like the thinking behind “Rome” which basically wants to pull everything together and vertically integrate. I’d almost go further and just white label a whole stack just like ours. Including CI/CD, monorepo, etc. If we could pause in 6 months or so and just extract everything we’ve built into that, it’d be a great template.

IMHO the ideal workflow for me is: write -> test -> install.

Nothing more than that.

Perhaps the complexity increase when we start giving funny names for simple things, opinions, personal preferences...

Countless hours can be wasted arguing what "deploy" is, what an "artifact" is, "container", etc.

Boring is better.

Agree with another who said it’s always the people that end up being a problem and not tech. Unfortunately a lot of tech geared towards fixing the problem ends up creating more of this because there is a new team that has to be created to add the new tech solution to the mix. Given that, I’d like a devx stack that lets a developer go as vertical as possible without involving other people. Once you decide to add a feature, you should be able to go all the way to deployment (and iterating) without involving anybody else.

My ideal devx stack(some parts exist but some don’t)

1. Heroku like deployments everywhere in a Unix like standard fashion. If the standard exists, I’d not worry about vendor lock-in and can choose the right provider for my scale/cost etc. I’ll also be able to have the same workflows for private DCs , dev setups etc without running huge bills.

2. Heroku CI/flow/pipeline, again standardized so I’m not stuck with one vendor.

3. GitHub + VsCode (or vi or emacs or pycharm) delivered as an offline first service. With templating capabilities so you can onboard new team members with a click.

3. Expo.io like capabilities across platforms. I get it that it’s already available for iOS, Android and web. But what if I have a native app? What about a server I wrote in c/c++? Docker probably. But the updates are still not handled for me automatically.

4. As a historically backend person, I find it hard to believe it took this long for the front end world to get to the component framework. I’d like to be able to create frontend pages by just pointing to an openAPI crud spec. I want to be able to add special buttons or forms in one line (no more) by just specifying a non-crud openAPI spec. We are almost there but not quite.

5. Since Saas is the future, All user management, subscription, engagement tracking, support, Customer pipeline etc should be a few line setups.

So I’d get up one day having dreamt of a new feature, walk to my home office in pajamas, code up the backend, specify how to expose it in the frontend, add a few test cases and click submit. It goes through testing locally, in staging, to production, gets distributed a set of people, and sends me some data on how good the dream can be by the time I finish my coffee. If I am happy I click “roll out “ And the entire world benefits from my dream.

Some companies have painstakingly built this stack. One man shows can actually do this fairly easily but mainly because the User base is small. But nothing that works for medium sized companies.

Too much to ask?