Pragmatic Developer Experience
@pragmaticdx.com
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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What's your team's unspoken rule for when documentation is 'good enough' vs when it needs to be perfect? Or does everything just stay in draft mode forever?
November 17, 2025 at 11:14 PM
What's your team's unspoken rule for when documentation is 'good enough' vs when it needs to be perfect? Or does everything just stay in draft mode forever?
What's the programming language you love that nobody else seems to care about anymore?
November 17, 2025 at 5:14 PM
What's the programming language you love that nobody else seems to care about anymore?
How do you explain to non-technical stakeholders that 'just add a button' is actually a 2-week project touching 8 different services?
November 17, 2025 at 11:14 AM
How do you explain to non-technical stakeholders that 'just add a button' is actually a 2-week project touching 8 different services?
Your junior developer asks why we don't just rewrite everything in [hot new framework]. What's your response that doesn't crush their enthusiasm but also acknowledges reality?
November 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM
Your junior developer asks why we don't just rewrite everything in [hot new framework]. What's your response that doesn't crush their enthusiasm but also acknowledges reality?
When you discover a critical security vulnerability in production, what's your incident response? Fix first, tell people later, or panic immediately?
November 16, 2025 at 11:14 PM
When you discover a critical security vulnerability in production, what's your incident response? Fix first, tell people later, or panic immediately?
How many layers of abstraction does your codebase have? At what point does 'clean architecture' become 'I need a map to find where anything actually happens'?
November 16, 2025 at 5:14 PM
How many layers of abstraction does your codebase have? At what point does 'clean architecture' become 'I need a map to find where anything actually happens'?
Your PR has been approved but you spot a bug right before merging. Do you fix it in a new commit, start over, or just merge and fix it later?
November 16, 2025 at 11:14 AM
Your PR has been approved but you spot a bug right before merging. Do you fix it in a new commit, start over, or just merge and fix it later?
When documentation says 'deprecated' but provides no alternative or migration path, is that helpful or just mean?
November 16, 2025 at 5:14 AM
When documentation says 'deprecated' but provides no alternative or migration path, is that helpful or just mean?
What's your strategy when you're 90% done with a feature and realize your entire approach was wrong? Start over or hack it together and refactor later (aka never)?
November 15, 2025 at 11:14 PM
What's your strategy when you're 90% done with a feature and realize your entire approach was wrong? Start over or hack it together and refactor later (aka never)?
How do you keep learning new technologies when you barely have time to master what you're already using?
November 15, 2025 at 5:14 PM
How do you keep learning new technologies when you barely have time to master what you're already using?
You inherit a 5000-line function that nobody understands but somehow runs the entire business. Do you refactor it or treat it like an archaeological artifact that must never be disturbed?
November 15, 2025 at 11:14 AM
You inherit a 5000-line function that nobody understands but somehow runs the entire business. Do you refactor it or treat it like an archaeological artifact that must never be disturbed?
When you finally solve a problem that's been haunting you for days, do you feel accomplished or just annoyed it took that long?
November 15, 2025 at 5:14 AM
When you finally solve a problem that's been haunting you for days, do you feel accomplished or just annoyed it took that long?
When your test suite takes 2 hours to run, do you actually wait for it or just push and pray? What's your acceptable CI/CD wait time before you start cutting corners?
November 14, 2025 at 11:14 PM
When your test suite takes 2 hours to run, do you actually wait for it or just push and pray? What's your acceptable CI/CD wait time before you start cutting corners?
Your tech lead wants to adopt a new technology because it's interesting, not because it solves a problem. How do you push back without seeming negative?
November 14, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Your tech lead wants to adopt a new technology because it's interesting, not because it solves a problem. How do you push back without seeming negative?
What's your team's policy on Friday deployments? Forbidden, encouraged, or 'deploy and flee'?
November 14, 2025 at 11:14 AM
What's your team's policy on Friday deployments? Forbidden, encouraged, or 'deploy and flee'?
What's your ratio of time spent coding new features vs maintaining/debugging existing features? Is it what you expected when you became a developer?
November 14, 2025 at 5:14 AM
What's your ratio of time spent coding new features vs maintaining/debugging existing features? Is it what you expected when you became a developer?
Your error message says 'Something went wrong.' Thanks. Super helpful. What's the most useless error message you've encountered that made debugging 10x harder?
November 13, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Your error message says 'Something went wrong.' Thanks. Super helpful. What's the most useless error message you've encountered that made debugging 10x harder?
What's your record for longest period of uninterrupted coding time? Mine is pathetically low. Are we all just glorified context-switchers now?
November 13, 2025 at 11:14 AM
What's your record for longest period of uninterrupted coding time? Mine is pathetically low. Are we all just glorified context-switchers now?
What's the most 'enterprise' thing about your codebase? XML configuration files? Factory factory factories?
November 13, 2025 at 5:14 AM
What's the most 'enterprise' thing about your codebase? XML configuration files? Factory factory factories?
What's your team's policy on technical debt? Pay it down regularly, ignore it until it explodes, or just keep adding to the pile?
November 12, 2025 at 11:14 PM
What's your team's policy on technical debt? Pay it down regularly, ignore it until it explodes, or just keep adding to the pile?
How do you balance writing clever, elegant code vs code that's so simple your future self won't need to decipher it?
November 12, 2025 at 5:14 PM
How do you balance writing clever, elegant code vs code that's so simple your future self won't need to decipher it?
What's your take on 'code ownership'? Does it create accountability or just bottlenecks and knowledge silos?
November 12, 2025 at 5:14 AM
What's your take on 'code ownership'? Does it create accountability or just bottlenecks and knowledge silos?
When you find a genius solution on Stack Overflow, do you understand it before using it or just copy-paste and move on?
November 11, 2025 at 11:14 PM
When you find a genius solution on Stack Overflow, do you understand it before using it or just copy-paste and move on?
What's worse: A codebase with zero tests or a codebase with tests that never fail even when everything is broken?
November 11, 2025 at 5:14 PM
What's worse: A codebase with zero tests or a codebase with tests that never fail even when everything is broken?
Success isn’t about pushing developers harder, it’s about shaping the system around them. When doing the right thing feels effortless, excellence becomes inevitable.
Make the Easy Path the Right Path
Success isn’t about pushing developers harder, it’s about shaping the system around them. When doing the right thing feels effortless, excellence becomes inevitable.
blog.pragmaticdx.com
November 11, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Success isn’t about pushing developers harder, it’s about shaping the system around them. When doing the right thing feels effortless, excellence becomes inevitable.