I’ve realized that over the course of what’s coming up to be a 20 year career, the common theme in almost all my “I need a new job” moments is that I get fed up with how slow the dev loop is. I seem to always find myself in situations where it takes from several minutes up to hours between making a change and being able to see it in action.
Some examples: when I worked as a C++ dev doing systems programming, the build time was crazy, plus often having to deploy things to a test system and reboot before being able to test it. As a Java developer building backend services, the build was fast but it took minutes to deploy everything to an environment so I could play with it. As an embedded developer, it took a long time to get everything flashed onto test hardware and having everything set up to debug things. And so on…
The one thing I can thing about is front end web dev, but my experience there is limited. I’ve only ever done it in my own time with vanilla js, no frameworks or anything. I was really pleased with how I could just save a file and refresh the browser and voila, changes are instantly available.
Wondering if folks can share their experiences having quick dev loops. I feel like it’d be super satisfying to have a job where you get consistently fast feedback as you do your work.
If you adopt TDD, your feedback loop is minutes and seconds after you save your files.
I think I'd struggle with the idea "see". I'm a back end dev so for me seeing the json payload is about as much as I see. If I'm asked to make the code do X and return Y when the user passed in Z, then that's where I find bliss.