Pragmatic Developer Experience

What's the code smell you're most guilty of creating yourself? The thing you tell others not to do but somehow keeps appearing in your PRs?

When your estimates are consistently off by 2-3x, is that a you problem or an estimation problem?

When your code reviewer requests changes that are purely stylistic preferences, do you make the changes or start a philosophical debate about code aesthetics?

What's the longest-lived branch in your repository? Is it a feature that's almost done or a graveyard of abandoned ideas?

What's the longest you've debugged something before realizing you were looking at the wrong environment, wrong branch, or wrong repository entirely?

When your staging environment hasn't matched production in 6 months, is it even staging anymore or just an elaborate trust fall exercise?

What's your controversial take on code coverage metrics? Necessary discipline or cargo cult testing theater?

What's your team's definition of 'production ready'? Does it mean tested, documented, and monitored, or just 'it worked on my machine once'?

What's the ratio of time you spend writing code vs waiting for builds, deploys, and CI pipelines? Are we developers or professional waiters?

When someone says 'this should be a quick fix' how much do you multiply that estimate by in your head? 3x? 5x? 10x?

When you see a job posting asking for 10 years of experience in a technology that's 5 years old, do you laugh or cry?

What's your honest take on microservices? Revolutionary architecture or distributed monolith with extra steps and network latency?

When you see 'temporarily hardcoded' in a comment from 3 years ago, do you fix it or accept that temporary is actually permanent?

How many times have you written 'TODO: optimize this later' knowing that later will never come?

What's the worst legacy code comment you've found? 'Do not touch' with no explanation? 'This works, don't ask why'?

What's your most embarrassing git mistake? Force push to main? Delete the wrong branch? Commit credentials?

How do you handle the pressure to be a 'full-stack developer' when you really just want to be great at one thing?

When AI suggests code that works but you don't fully understand, do you use it anyway or insist on comprehending every line?

What's your policy on commenting code? Document everything, only document the weird stuff, or assume future developers can figure it out?

What's the feature you built that you were super proud of that users completely ignored? How long did it take you to accept they just don't care?

What's the percentage of your 'engineering time' that's actually engineering vs attending meetings about engineering?

How many times can you run 'git pull' before you realize you forgot to commit your changes? Asking for a friend who definitely isn't me.

What's your threshold for 'good enough' vs 'perfect'? Does it change at 5 PM on Friday?

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

Max Kanat-Alexander breaks down why cycle time, focus, and cognitive load determine whether your engineering team thrives or burns out

When your architecture diagram needs its own zoom levels to be readable, is that thorough documentation or a sign you've overengineered everything?

What's the programming concept you explained to someone that made you realize you didn't understand it as well as you thought?

How do you decide when to stop optimizing code? When it's fast enough, when you run out of time, or when you've exhausted Stack Overflow?

How do you stay motivated working on a legacy system where every change feels like defusing a bomb?

How many times have you written the same explanation in Slack before realizing it should probably be a doc? What's your threshold for 'this should be documented' vs 'I'll just answer it again next week'?

Building Developer-First APIs Behind every great API is a team that remembered what it feels like to be the developer on the other side of the screen.

blog.pragmaticdx.com/p/building-d...