[Dansvidania]

Good local dev-env is vital for productivity, but even more so for dev satisfaction and engagement.

I have been arguing with myself on what a good dev-env is for as long as I have been working in enterprise software dev which by now is about 10 years.

All I know is that attempts to reproduce prod via tilt and similar have not been successful (I have witnessed 3 attempts). The promise of "one dev env for all teams" quickly falls apart.

The main problems with this are IMO: - 1. there is a false sense of encapsulation of complexity: you don't need to know how the components of non-owned services work, until something breaks (and break it will), and then you really do. - 2. #1 + docker + k8s + kafka + graphql etc... make complexity seem very cheap. - 3. add a minimum of deadline pressure on teams, and quickly they will stop caring about keeping the dev-env images up-to-date and/or working.

I would rather have intimate familiarity with what my services depend on, which is much easier to get by running these dependencies somewhat manually, close to natively. You can be sure that your colleagues will come knocking if complexity is not respected.

But this seems hard to package as a product...