I was making a sandwich analogy. The butter makes things run smoothly.

The other components are good tech/business alignment, an agile dev process, testing, and automated deployments.

To succeed, you can't get just some parts right; you need to get all the parts right.

However, one of the most underrated aspects is the developer experience. I'm constantly surprised by how much pain people suffer through just because it's always been this way.

Here's what you can do today ...

Make it run in a container so that all your dependencies are explicitly defined. It should start with one command.

Make the build process insanely fast. If it takes 12 seconds to build, that seems reasonable until you realize you are building hundreds of times.

If you can reduce it to a few seconds, you'll save significant hours of development time and boost productivity.

The thing is, this is usually not complicated to do. It just needs a day or two of focused time and someone to dig in and endure the pain of something not working.

It's not good enough ...

Being a new joiner to a team can be a superpower in this case.

Everyone else is accustomed to the slowness; you just can't let that slide.

Fix it yourself and thank me later.

But if you need some help, I'm here.

Also, enforce consistent coding standards. In 2024, this can be automated through configuration and the editor. There is no excuse for formatting code manually.

Yours,

Taj