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by dpenguin 2203 days ago
Agree with another who said it’s always the people that end up being a problem and not tech. Unfortunately a lot of tech geared towards fixing the problem ends up creating more of this because there is a new team that has to be created to add the new tech solution to the mix. Given that, I’d like a devx stack that lets a developer go as vertical as possible without involving other people. Once you decide to add a feature, you should be able to go all the way to deployment (and iterating) without involving anybody else.

My ideal devx stack(some parts exist but some don’t)

1. Heroku like deployments everywhere in a Unix like standard fashion. If the standard exists, I’d not worry about vendor lock-in and can choose the right provider for my scale/cost etc. I’ll also be able to have the same workflows for private DCs , dev setups etc without running huge bills.

2. Heroku CI/flow/pipeline, again standardized so I’m not stuck with one vendor.

3. GitHub + VsCode (or vi or emacs or pycharm) delivered as an offline first service. With templating capabilities so you can onboard new team members with a click.

3. Expo.io like capabilities across platforms. I get it that it’s already available for iOS, Android and web. But what if I have a native app? What about a server I wrote in c/c++? Docker probably. But the updates are still not handled for me automatically.

4. As a historically backend person, I find it hard to believe it took this long for the front end world to get to the component framework. I’d like to be able to create frontend pages by just pointing to an openAPI crud spec. I want to be able to add special buttons or forms in one line (no more) by just specifying a non-crud openAPI spec. We are almost there but not quite.

5. Since Saas is the future, All user management, subscription, engagement tracking, support, Customer pipeline etc should be a few line setups.

So I’d get up one day having dreamt of a new feature, walk to my home office in pajamas, code up the backend, specify how to expose it in the frontend, add a few test cases and click submit. It goes through testing locally, in staging, to production, gets distributed a set of people, and sends me some data on how good the dream can be by the time I finish my coffee. If I am happy I click “roll out “ And the entire world benefits from my dream.

Some companies have painstakingly built this stack. One man shows can actually do this fairly easily but mainly because the User base is small. But nothing that works for medium sized companies.

Too much to ask?