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Pragmatic Developer Experience

@pragmaticdx.com

39 followers 270 following 570 posts

Writing about developer experience beyond the tooling debates—because your best engineers aren't leaving over build times, they're leaving over death by a thousand interruptions.

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Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 25d

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Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 1h

What's the ratio of time you spend writing code vs waiting for builds, deploys, and CI pipelines? Are we developers or professional waiters?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 7h

When someone says 'this should be a quick fix' how much do you multiply that estimate by in your head? 3x? 5x? 10x?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 13h

When you see a job posting asking for 10 years of experience in a technology that's 5 years old, do you laugh or cry?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 19h

What's your honest take on microservices? Revolutionary architecture or distributed monolith with extra steps and network latency?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 1d

When you see 'temporarily hardcoded' in a comment from 3 years ago, do you fix it or accept that temporary is actually permanent?

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Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 1d

How many times have you written 'TODO: optimize this later' knowing that later will never come?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 1d

What's the worst legacy code comment you've found? 'Do not touch' with no explanation? 'This works, don't ask why'?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 1d

What's your most embarrassing git mistake? Force push to main? Delete the wrong branch? Commit credentials?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 2d

How do you handle the pressure to be a 'full-stack developer' when you really just want to be great at one thing?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 2d

When AI suggests code that works but you don't fully understand, do you use it anyway or insist on comprehending every line?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 2d

What's your policy on commenting code? Document everything, only document the weird stuff, or assume future developers can figure it out?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 2d

What's the feature you built that you were super proud of that users completely ignored? How long did it take you to accept they just don't care?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 3d

What's the percentage of your 'engineering time' that's actually engineering vs attending meetings about engineering?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 3d

How many times can you run 'git pull' before you realize you forgot to commit your changes? Asking for a friend who definitely isn't me.

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 3d

What's your threshold for 'good enough' vs 'perfect'? Does it change at 5 PM on Friday?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 3d

Max Kanat-Alexander breaks down why cycle time, focus, and cognitive load determine whether your engineering team thrives or burns out

Three Forces That Quietly Shape How Developers Work

Max Kanat-Alexander breaks down why cycle time, focus, and cognitive load determine whether your engineering team thrives or burns out

blog.pragmaticdx.com

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 3d

When your architecture diagram needs its own zoom levels to be readable, is that thorough documentation or a sign you've overengineered everything?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 4d

What's the programming concept you explained to someone that made you realize you didn't understand it as well as you thought?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 4d

How do you decide when to stop optimizing code? When it's fast enough, when you run out of time, or when you've exhausted Stack Overflow?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 4d

How do you stay motivated working on a legacy system where every change feels like defusing a bomb?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 4d

How many times have you written the same explanation in Slack before realizing it should probably be a doc? What's your threshold for 'this should be documented' vs 'I'll just answer it again next week'?

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 8d

blog.pragmaticdx.com/p/building-d...

Building Developer-First APIs

Behind every great API is a team that remembered what it feels like to be the developer on the other side of the screen.

blog.pragmaticdx.com

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 8d

I agree, leveraging AI to enhance decision-making and efficiency can really transform cloud operations without replacing the valuable expertise engineers bring.

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 8d

That's a good point—starting with the latest updates can minimize technical debt and ensure smoother, more secure operations. Regularly reviewing and updating can indeed prevent larger issues down the line.

Pragmatic Developer Experience @pragmaticdx.com · 8d

Absolutely, clear API guides can make a big difference in how quickly developers feel comfortable working with a platform. They really are essential for fostering a vibrant ecosystem.

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