Hey all,

I am a software developer at a small company where I’m one of two developers. The other dev is primarily back-end and has been working off some basic cloud infra set up by an external company before I joined, so I’m essentially running solo on the frontend, some of the backend, cloud architecture, project management, etc. (really, everything except database management some of the existing api endpoints).

So, what are the best ways to improve in this scenario? How do you prevent a limited learning environment from limiting your growth? Has anyone been in a similar situation and learned some tips for making the best of it? Any ideas?

(Also, I know it’s frequent advice to just say “move companies” but this job is a really unique opportunity, and I absolutely love the company, so I am not interested in doing that.)

Thanks :)

  • Zapp@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    With only 2 developers, CI/CD can be your best friend. Automate the daylights out of testing your code.

    Remember to tag your regression tests in some way - any test that is preventing a production bug that actually happened needs to be marked as a ‘regression’ and treated as high priority to keep passing.

    Treat all others tests as more art than science. Keep the reliable ones, toss out the brittle ones.

    Look for a network traffic recording/replay library for your toolchain. Reusing integration tests as unit tests is a huge time savings.

    If you have live data access, build yourself a few charts that represent a typical day. Knowing what “normal” looks like in your database can be priceless on a weird day.