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 interested in trying the .NET Core and Blazor stack. However, "Visual Studio" is not my idea of the ideal developer experience... Maybe if the projects could be developed in VSCode
Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
81–90 of 92 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#82The problem is competition, innovation, and low cost of replication. Without these it would be so much easier.
You see as soon as you make it easy to do X, everyone does X, X becomes cheap, there is no business in making X anymore, you need to do complicated thing Y.
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#83- There should be only one way to build, test and deploy the project. It should be as simple as possible.
- Every environment should be as close to the production environment as possible. The local and staging data should closely match production data.
- Easy mistakes should be prevented by automation. Commit hooks, linters and other tools should maintain quality at a low cost.
Generally, it's all about reducing friction and preventing human error where it's cheap to do so.
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#84I 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…
What's the project?
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#85I 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?
Yup. For a large desktop LOB app. Had to reinvent a few wheels because Blazor is so young (have high hopes to open source some of that). Build automation is a lot simpler for desktop-world. We do wish the framework and community were more mature, but are nevertheless very pleased with our decision.
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#86I often consult other teams in my company on technical issues and architecture. Coming from this background I always wish the following would be covered: - The project should start up with one click or one command. It's fine if I need to configure credentials or something similar, but beyond that, your project should be so easy to start that your mom could do it. If the project requires me to locally install a databa…
The one click start up point makes a lot of sense for Frontend developers! Auto installing a DB in the same command you use to run the app is pretty dumb though. What if I just want to point my instance at staging for testing? Now I have to have docker installed
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#87"Rethinking from first principles" and "reinventing the wheel" are pretty easy to conflate. Proceed with caution. My recommendation is to choose boring technologies that are widely deployed so that people will have to support them for decades to come. If there isn't a mature, well-supported option in a space, it's better to roll your own than to spend a bunch of time learning a technology and writing code, and then h…
Looking at this list from the perspective of a career programmer who spends most of their time writing small utilities in Python - this is horrifying. 8 moving parts spread across different organizations is an "ideal user experience"? I'm once again glad I don't work in web dev.
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#88I 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 tr…
Something like Github Codespaces[1] but self-hosted would be interesting. I'm sure you can cobble something together now but it would be nice not to have to deal with the infrastructure (i.e. containers, remote hosts, VPCs, whatever).
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#89> ... there is still so much that stands in my way ...
I keep reading this on HN and I am surprised every time. It is so much easier nowadays to develop software than it used to be. Back when I started out there was no HN, no Stack Overflow, no online software developer community that I had access to. I had to learn everything from books and often had nobody to ask. It is so much easier nowadays. I honestly would love to understand what it is that makes it feel hard? Does anybody have a good insight as to why?
Re: Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?
#90there is still so much that stands in my way My experience is that technology has never stood in my way. It may be inconvenient, but I always find a way to work with it. The thing that has always been in my way is other people. Always. For me: 1. A boss who has a clue. Who has actually built software deployed to production at least once. Who understands the customer's business. Who manages things and leads people, no…
You nailed it. 100% agree.