A sentence said with noise canceling headphones Screenshot
One of the most critical things for the development experience is the development environment itself. Development tools (Dev Tools) are tools designed to help us, developers, be more productive at work. Development tools can be very diverse in nature, and accompany us throughout the entire development process: from the idea phase, through the planning phase, the code, the implementation and fixing bugs.
Everything – from our code editor, the IDE, libraries, to more advanced tools like Kubernetes that help with implementation, or tools for debugging – all of these are part of the mosaic of tools that make up our development environment. The main goal of using such tools is to simplify complex and infrastructural tasks, and above all, to prevent a situation where we solve the same problem twice.
Is there such a thing as too many Dev Tools?
Development tools can eliminate the Sisyphean work around the development work and automate many processes, so that we as developers can focus on what is important. However, this coin has two sides: on the one hand – tools can help us improve productivity by automating repetitive tasks and simplifying complex processes. On the other hand, with so many tools available on the market today that claim to make our lives easier, it is easy to get lost and create a very large cognitive load, since each and every one of us is now required to be familiar with dozens or hundreds of tools, in addition to the technical and engineering knowledge required of us to develop Software – contrary to the purpose for which we gathered: improving our productivity.
Assaf, the director of the frontend group at Wix, thinks for example that not every problem requires a dedicated tool, and that you should concentrate on solving painful and horizontal problems: “When you have gone beyond the 80-20, when you are not in a place where you solve 80% of the problem, but only 50% From her, we exaggerate.”
Ultimately, the development environment is an integral part of our day-to-day work. A development environment equipped with the right tools can improve our efficiency and productivity, but it is important to remember that it is also subject to many personal preferences – and it is important to find the right balance and use only tools that contribute and improve the work processes, without burdening the other team members as much as possible.
Development tools – customized
Alongside this challenge, the participants in Dark Mode talk about how they create a culture of good development experience in their company by implementing and developing specific tools and infrastructure, within the company. In Tabula, for example, the development of specific plugins for InteliJ, which help in the entire build process and speed it up. In other companies, various scripts and automations have been developed that help in the deployment process (deploy) to the cloud environment.
Little, a development leader at the Torii company, thinks that the necessary time should be invested in automating repetitive tasks: “Many times the things that take up our time are such tedious things that we have to do. A customer asked for something, how to find some information, delete data, so many times we try Make it a mission.”
Our future development environment
In recent years, with the cloud and open source revolution, our development environment has completely changed. Along with the many advantages, many challenges and additional barriers have also arisen (which they are trying to solve, again, using tools). Now that tools like ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot have broken into our lives, 2023 is likely to be another turning point, and it’s likely that our development environment won’t look the same next year.
The full episode awaits you here:
Dark {MOD} is a docu-comic network series for developers. Every two weeks we will upload a new episode on the YouTube page And in an extended version here at Giktimes.