On software engineers productivity

To an untrained eye it might appear that developer is doing nothing while build is in progress. But experienced programmers will know… we are working even though build is in progress. We’re often thinking about what could go wrong, what could we do better and having general worries about builds.

Taking a short breaks often leads to productivity boosts. It’s a fact that has been proven by scientific research. That’s why it’s important to not perceive building times or any other breaks as a slacking. It’s simply a mechanic that helps us be productive. It’s good to take a break from coding. Perhaps go outside take a walk around neighborhood, or simply go away from your computer. It will allow our brain to go into standby mode, after it, new ideas, on how to solve problems will arise. This works for both coding problems as well as any other difficult situation we might be facing in our life. Not to mention the stress reduction and it’s obvious benefits for our health. So next time our automation is running, it may be the perfect time to take a break.

Continuous integration

As developers we need to automate our builds. Thats where CI/CD comes into play. We use it to automate various tasks. From running test, make sure code is properly linted, all the way to domain specific tasks such us making sure there exists some kind of business documentation about the code, or generating usage documentation. Without automation to help us, we would be completely lost. Adhering to all those rules would take forever. So let us cherish modern ci tools such as github actions, circle ci, jenkins, gitlab and many others.

Did you know

The first mention of continuous integration was by Grady Booch in 1991. He didn’t advocate integrating several times a day. It’s just how things naturally evolved from there.

About Illustration

We’ve settled for a sloth for this developer tee. We think sloth perfectly describes how we feel when our builds are running. Even though we are aware of benefits of automated builds, we often feel like they are taking forever.

We’ve also enhanced our hero sloth with a glorious headsets. It is because we like to isolate ourself from outside noises to improve our focus and productivity. Playing some relaxed music on noise canceling headphones often helps with concentration.

We all know software engineers turn coffee into code, so we’ve added a nice, warm, cup of coffee to our sloth. All in all we think we’ve perfectly described the build in progress situation with this tee.

To make it funnier and more explicit we’ve added the text I am not slacking. Because while there is some automation running, we developers, often contemplate and reflect about it. Making it some of our most productive parts of the day. When mind clears, troubles are gone and creativity is born. Allowing us to solve other difficult tasks that are ahead of us.