What are the biggest pain points that you've experienced as a developer?
Would love to hear about other's experiences and pain points on teams or as solo developers. In my experience building SaaS, three big ones:
- Hiring other engineers: both sourcing and evaluating.
- Local development configuration and testing when integrating with third-parties/APIs (setting up Oauth applications, mocking APIs, etc.). This gets more complicated on teams with many engineers.
- Preventing spam.
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Installing a library and then installing packages required for that libraries, and then installing packages required for those packages and then you give up or die.
What ecosystem are you working in? What package manager are you using?
Mostly machine learning related, also this was the main reason I moved to colab and kaggle notebooks. Also when I work with flask I think it's a wasteful to make a virtual env and then install dependency on that venv
So python and pip?
One thing I'm struggling with is collaborating with business people with no dev background, especially marketers.
Not that I want to judge them nor do I try to outsmart them, but some almost live on completely another planet, away from actuality and how things work in real life.
I appreciate pushing boundaries and fully respect creative ideas but maybe it shouldn't be taken to an extent that you lose touch with customers or how that solution can be realistically implemented in real life.
Lol… sorry just had to laugh here. I was a developer and now I am a marketer. So, I can see the dysfunctional aspects on both sides. Marketers live to sell and their ego is boosted when they do something creative which can sometimes end up in a realm above earth. They are not really building anything except a marketing campaign to find satisfaction in. So, the only way they get satisfaction is in sometimes to spark their brain to do something awesome. Dev’s on the other hand are building stuff and solving problems with code. The result is in front of their eyes. A vey diff feeling! I have been on both sides and the pain is felt both ways.
And marketing very often doesn’t like details/specifics on technicalities. Half of my life is spent playing bridge with devs to arrive at a common ground.
Needless this tension always leads to headaches but very often good work as well.
Do you have an example? It is definitely difficult to explain complex technical topics to those without technical backgrounds. I often find that communicating in writing helps because it gives everyone the time to digest and think about what they have to say.
My lower back pain between l3 and l4 :D
Easy fix 👉 Herman Miller Aeron
Security... You never know if your app is safe!
You win, that's the worst.
Anything specific in the security space? Dependencies? WAF? Networking?
ALL!!!
Security is hard work these days, trying to adhere to dev security practices and responding to the latest zero days like log4j or just keeping the machine os or 3rd party libraries patched up. Seems like a never ending stream of issues being found in cyber security these days.
Are you already using tools like dependabot (https://github.com/features/security) ?
This is great were the code repo is on github. Not sure this can be used outside of github though.
Not sure either. What are you using? Gitlab?
Writing high quality tests, quickly. I find that writing good tests takes up maybe 90% of a task, and only 10% is spend actually implementing functionality. Tbh it's mostly mocking stuff out correctly and making sure the tests are sound.
I feel the same, unit tests seem to be a significant time investment, and continually needs to be updated as code is updated.
I'm curious if you've looked at (or currently do) E2E testing, and your experiences with that.
I've used E2E once, and I gotta say I really like it. In the past, I found myself manually testing old functionality to make sure new implementations didn't break them, so they can be a huge time saver since they're designed to closely mimic my manual testing.
I do a lot less unit testing nowadays in the interest of moving fast, but I do write separate tests for APIs since attackers could technically hit them directly and provide arbitrary input. Gotta stay secure!
Yeah that's exactly why I love E2E, automates the manual work that I'd do after a deploy. Have you stopped doing that these days?
I'd love to reach out over email with more questions if that's okay with you.
Yeah, I'm just starting a new project so not actively writing E2E, but will definitely be using them for this upcoming one.
And sure thing my email is on my profile!
Ari, any best practices re: preventing spam? One of the biggest pain points for me as well. Curious to hear if you have any tips here.
Happy to make some suggestions if I can! A lot of the time it depends on your context. What kind of spam are you seeing?
You listed it as one of your 3 main pain points. What was the context where you experienced it and what was your solution?
Depending on the situation it can be a constant battle and there isn't just one solution, especially in SaaS free trial situations. Some people require credit cards upfront for this reason.
There are various ways to reduce the amount of spam signups you see in SaaS. Things like preventing disposable emails, checking MX records on signup, using hidden fields as captchas, and timing how long it takes to fill out and submit a form to prevent bots. Other solutions are very much situational like blocking certain countries where you see a lot of spam, rate limiting, WAF, etc.
IH needs your expertise! So much spam.
Working in a dysfunctional team. Ego diffs causing issue after issue