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 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.
Every team thinks one more feature will make the launch better. In reality, it’s the fastest way to delay, over-engineer, and burn out before you ever ship.
The Hidden Cost of Adding Just One More Feature
Every team thinks one more feature will make the launch better. In reality, it’s the fastest way to delay, over-engineer, and burn out before you ever ship.
blog.pragmaticdx.com
November 11, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Every team thinks one more feature will make the launch better. In reality, it’s the fastest way to delay, over-engineer, and burn out before you ever ship.
Max Kanat-Alexander breaks down why cycle time, focus, and cognitive load determine whether your engineering team thrives or burns out
Three Forces That Quietly Shape How Developers Work
Max Kanat-Alexander breaks down why cycle time, focus, and cognitive load determine whether your engineering team thrives or burns out
blog.pragmaticdx.com
November 11, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Max Kanat-Alexander breaks down why cycle time, focus, and cognitive load determine whether your engineering team thrives or burns out
What's the passive-aggressive way people on your team signal they disagree with a technical decision without actually saying it? Slow code reviews? 'Interesting approach' comments?
November 11, 2025 at 11:14 AM
What's the passive-aggressive way people on your team signal they disagree with a technical decision without actually saying it? Slow code reviews? 'Interesting approach' comments?
Your production bug affects 5 users. Your ticket backlog has 200 items. How do you decide what actually matters vs what just feels urgent?
November 11, 2025 at 5:14 AM
Your production bug affects 5 users. Your ticket backlog has 200 items. How do you decide what actually matters vs what just feels urgent?
Your team has 3 different Slack channels for the same project, 2 Notion pages, and some Google Docs nobody can find. Is this organization or just distributed chaos?
November 10, 2025 at 11:14 PM
Your team has 3 different Slack channels for the same project, 2 Notion pages, and some Google Docs nobody can find. Is this organization or just distributed chaos?
Your local environment works. Staging is broken. Production is fine. Nobody knows why. How long do you debug the mystery before you just accept that staging is cursed?
November 10, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Your local environment works. Staging is broken. Production is fine. Nobody knows why. How long do you debug the mystery before you just accept that staging is cursed?
How do you tell a senior developer their code is a mess without starting a war? What's the diplomatic phrase that actually works in your experience?
November 10, 2025 at 11:14 AM
How do you tell a senior developer their code is a mess without starting a war? What's the diplomatic phrase that actually works in your experience?
What's the feature request you keep pushing back on because you know it'll break everything even though it sounds simple?
November 10, 2025 at 5:14 AM
What's the feature request you keep pushing back on because you know it'll break everything even though it sounds simple?
How do you handle the imposter syndrome when you Google the same basic syntax for the 100th time?
November 9, 2025 at 11:14 PM
How do you handle the imposter syndrome when you Google the same basic syntax for the 100th time?
When your monitoring alerts fire at 3 AM, what's your response time? Immediate, 'wait to see if it self-heals', or 'I'll check in the morning'?
November 9, 2025 at 5:14 PM
When your monitoring alerts fire at 3 AM, what's your response time? Immediate, 'wait to see if it self-heals', or 'I'll check in the morning'?
How many levels of indentation is too many? What does your nesting nightmare look like?
November 9, 2025 at 11:14 AM
How many levels of indentation is too many? What does your nesting nightmare look like?
When you block your calendar for 'focus time' do people respect it, ignore it, or just book over it anyway? What actually works for protecting deep work?
November 9, 2025 at 5:14 AM
When you block your calendar for 'focus time' do people respect it, ignore it, or just book over it anyway? What actually works for protecting deep work?
When your API returns a 200 status code but the payload is an error message, is that creative or just wrong?
November 8, 2025 at 11:14 PM
When your API returns a 200 status code but the payload is an error message, is that creative or just wrong?
When a tool update breaks your workflow, how many hours do you waste trying to fix it before you just rollback and pretend the update never happened?
November 8, 2025 at 5:14 PM
When a tool update breaks your workflow, how many hours do you waste trying to fix it before you just rollback and pretend the update never happened?
How do you know when it's time to abandon a debugging session and ask for help? After 30 minutes? 3 hours? When you start questioning your career choices?
November 8, 2025 at 11:14 AM
How do you know when it's time to abandon a debugging session and ask for help? After 30 minutes? 3 hours? When you start questioning your career choices?
What's worse: Inheriting code with no tests or inheriting code where the tests are more complex than the actual code?
November 8, 2025 at 5:14 AM
What's worse: Inheriting code with no tests or inheriting code where the tests are more complex than the actual code?
What's the certification or course you paid for that you never finished? Are we all just collecting learning debt?
November 7, 2025 at 11:14 PM
What's the certification or course you paid for that you never finished? Are we all just collecting learning debt?
How many 'temporary' fixes in your codebase are now load-bearing and can never be removed?
November 7, 2025 at 5:14 PM
How many 'temporary' fixes in your codebase are now load-bearing and can never be removed?
What's the technical decision you made that seemed brilliant at the time but aged like milk?
November 7, 2025 at 11:14 AM
What's the technical decision you made that seemed brilliant at the time but aged like milk?