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

It isn’t 1999 on Slashdot anymore. Using a dollar sign on a site dedicated to an ecosystem surrounding venture capital and all its friends just makes you look hilariously out of touch.

Yeah, poo on Microsoft for being a successful capitalist entity, said the community of people who work for, want to work for, or find a living supporting FAANG or the advertising and VC ecosystem propping it up.

I am a very occasional programmer. I maintain several different projects for my business; sometimes not working on them for six months or a year.

I've learned to actively loathe getting started on a new feature for one of my sites. The typical process starts by trying to make a simple change to the codebase, only to learn that some tool needs updating (who knows why), but only after digging around for half an hour trying to figure out why something simple doesn't work. I then try to update the tool, but the update doesn't work, because something else has changed on my dev machine, making the update incompatible. After trying to update everything for a couple of hours, I sometimes manage to get the development environment working again, at which time I actually start coding. Sometimes I just give up and try again in a couple of months.

In the good old days, I would just open a code editor and edit a PHP file, then upload via FTP.

If only it were that simple now. My ideal developer experience would be to simply be able to open my computer and start coding – even if I hadn't worked on a project in a few years.

Not OP, but I've used containers to run temporary local databases for development.

If you're also packaging your application as a container you can use container orchestration tools like `docker-compose` to compile your app and up a local dev environment with all your external dependencies with a single command (eg `docker-compose up`).

This is a really great question, thanks for starting this discussion!

Based on my experiences, here are some ideas regarding a hypothetical ideal developer environment - some technical, some cultural:

- A supportive and responsive team who help each other to get valuable features developed, deployed and maintained

- Thoughtfully-written test coverage that allows for code evolution, while providing reassurance that changes are correct

- Local, test and production environments where deployed code behaves identically or near-identically

- Languages and API documentation that are accessible, expressive and composable while remaining straightforward to reason about

- Development, deployment and operational tools that lend themselves well to automation so that frustrating and error-prone manual tasks can be reduced

- Rapid notifications regarding problems encountered by users -- ideally only occuring infrequently, thanks to high code quality, and implemented in a user-privacy-preserving way (to avoid developer anxiety regarding imagined or real lack of organizational respect for users)

- Code review (for various social and educational reasons, as well as improvement of code quality)

- Human product feedback, in terms of quality assurance and also genuine user feedback

- A high-motivation and low-pressurization work setting -- with a sense that the delivered software is genuinely providing a net benefit and is able to anticipate and respond to harms and ideally prevent them in future

- The time and team approval to investigate bugs and contribute the discovered fixes upstream outside the organization

It also strikes me while writing this that software may be considered easier and/or more comfortable than other careers.

While it's good to strive to find further improvements, it's worth pushing for other employers (and perhaps industries?) to do the same.

Most answers are about backend/infra etc but i'm going with client side apps and especially Flutter(Dart) + Android Studio. In 30 minutes, tops you have a production-ready environment to develop mobile (and soon web) apps.

- flutter doctor: checks your Flutter installation and shows missing platform dependencies, if any.

- Dart is a very nice statically typed language with a decent standard library.

- Flutter has A LOT of prebuild components for almost everything you need and makes it easy for you to build your own by composing existing ones.

- Built-in code formatting tool (dartfmt) and testing framework

- flutter.dev has everything you need to know in one place.

- pub.dev is a central place for all packages. dartdoc generates beautiful API reference pages for all packages on pub.dev and you can use it on your own packages as well.

- It works on all devices, all android 4.1.x or newer and iPhone.

I think it's the best tool if you want quickly build a nice looking user interface.