Ask HN: What are some dev jobs with quick feedback loops?

1 pointswatermelon593y ago1 comments

I’ve realized that over the course of what’s coming up to be a 20 year career, the common theme in almost all my “I need a new job” moments is that I get fed up with how slow the dev loop is. I seem to always find myself in situations where it takes from several minutes up to hours between making a change and being able to see it in action.

Some examples: when I worked as a C++ dev doing systems programming, the build time was crazy, plus often having to deploy things to a test system and reboot before being able to test it. As a Java developer building backend services, the build was fast but it took minutes to deploy everything to an environment so I could play with it. As an embedded developer, it took a long time to get everything flashed onto test hardware and having everything set up to debug things. And so on…

The one thing I can thing about is front end web dev, but my experience there is limited. I’ve only ever done it in my own time with vanilla js, no frameworks or anything. I was really pleased with how I could just save a file and refresh the browser and voila, changes are instantly available.

Wondering if folks can share their experiences having quick dev loops. I feel like it’d be super satisfying to have a job where you get consistently fast feedback as you do your work.

1 comments

john_the_writer3y ago

I work in Rails and Elixir. Feedback is super fast. I get feedback before I write a line of code. My tests fail, and I get feedback. Then as the day moves on less and less of my tests fail. It's a super awesome feeling seeing green. It is also a great feeling seeing red when something is breaking in production and I manage to replicate it in a test.

If you adopt TDD, your feedback loop is minutes and seconds after you save your files.

I think I'd struggle with the idea "see". I'm a back end dev so for me seeing the json payload is about as much as I see. If I'm asked to make the code do X and return Y when the user passed in Z, then that's where I find bliss.

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