This week at work we were talking about improving the developer experience around the company. It is about how it feels to work with the technical systems as a software developer. Is it fun or frustrating to develop a new feature? What about debugging a production issue?
If you were truly ambitious about it, you might ask how to make it more fun and more exciting and more meaningful. We were more pragmatic and asked how to make it less frustrating.
Doesn’t lessening frustration make things more fun? To an extent yes, but joy is not just a lack of a frustration. Being less frustrated makes more space for joy but there has to be something else to be joyful about.
But maybe you can’t bring joy or meaning into the work from developer experience perspective. That has to come from the work itself.
Anyway, reducing frustration in development workflow comes down to two things:
- Reducing friction. When you want to do something, do you know how to do it? Do you have to ask someone or can you just do it? Do you know how to look things up? Do you need to execute many manual steps? Do you need to make many decisions you don’t care about?
- Tightening the feedback loops. When you do something, you’ll want to know if it had a positive effect. You made a code change – did it work? You deployed something – did it work?
These are overlapping themes. You can reduce friction by doing things like improving documentation, automating manual work, and agreeiqng on standard ways of doing things. Feedback loops can be tightened by speeding up build times, test suites, and CI pipelines, and improving observability.
The elephant in the room is technical debt. Legacy systems, hasty implementations, and poor architectural choices are a big source of frustration for software developers, but they cannot be made go away by polishing the workflow.
Every team is going to have tech debt, but you can keep it under control by actively managing it. However, that requires investing time and effort into it and often the decisionmakers aren’t eager to allow that despite it slowing everything down.
Recommendation: Yeung Man Hamburger Helper
This time I’m going to recommend a recipe I recently discovered.
While we were sailing, a friend cooked us hamburger helper based on the recipe by Yeung Man Cooking. It’s a pasta dish with tofu, soy sauce, and red wine, inspired by the American food product from the 1970s. I liked it, and I liked it when I cooked it myself at home. There’s no guarantee that what tastes great during a long day on the sea also tastes great at home, but this time it worked.
I’ve been looking for new, easy, vegetarian dishes for my weeknight cooking rotation and after cooking it a few times, looks like it’s going to be one. I don’t cook much with tofu or red wine, so it brings some new variety.
You can read the recipe from the video description but I recommend watching the video. The ASMR style presentation is great and funny.
Photo: A cable car going to the top of Wank. You can see Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the valley.