I'm curious to hear what aspects of your development process get tedious and how you wish they could be automated. Personally, I find the Jira to IDE to PR cycle really draining: constantly reading tickets, switching contexts back to the codebase, writing the same routines, and opening PRs multiple times a day takes a lot of time. I've started looking into automating parts of this loop and wonder what others feel about this. If you could automate anything in your workflow, what would it be?
5 Answers
Finding bugs can be a nightmare, especially when users just say, 'the app doesn't work' without any context. I've started to ask for more specific info, like timestamps or URLs to ease the troubleshooting, but it’s still a challenge.
Meetings are the worst! I’ve started blocking out focus time in my schedule to avoid interruptions. It’s amazing how people adjust once they see they can’t book that time. If only all meetings could just be replaced with an email instead!
I've found that too! Focus blocks help keep distractions away. I just wish we could get to the point where meetings are actually useful.
I really dislike the context switching that happens. Just getting back into the right frame of mind, dealing with tickets, Slack, PRs, and documentation is a hassle. Automating context reconstruction would be a game changer—some tool that gives you a summary of relevant tickets and previous commits would save so much time.
Totally agree! The time wasted digging into past documents to get the context can add up super fast. I’d like to see tools developed to break down that overhead.
Writing documentation is painful, but it's necessary. I’ve started making quick comments as I code, which helps. At least then I don’t have to try and remember everything months later when I need to document it.
The documentation paradox hits hard. Everyone complains about it being missing but nobody wants to write it. I feel like the best solution is doing it as you go.
Honestly, the biggest headache for me is gathering meaningful requirements from clients. They often say vague things like 'make it more fun' without any real direction. If only we had a way to get clear and precise ideas from non-developers, that would save us so much trouble!
Right? That vague language makes it tough. I've started asking for short videos explaining their ideas; it at least cuts down some confusion.
Lol, those reports are the worst! Getting at least a timestamp makes such a difference when digging through logs.