Developer experience
Making day-to-day development faster and calmer, from onboarding and environments to agent workflows.
40 posts · page 2 of 2
Set Up CI With GitHub Actions in Ten Minutes
Continuous integration runs your checks on every push and pull request, so broken code is caught before it merges — whoever, or whatever, wrote it. A working GitHub Actions workflow for a Node project, what each line does, how to make checks required, and the mistakes that make CI slow or insecure.
Git Branches Explained for Beginners
A branch is a safe parallel copy of your project where you can try something without touching the working version. What branches are, the commands to create, switch, and merge them, a simple workflow for solo builders, and why branches matter when an AI agent is editing your code.
Feature Flags for Small Teams: Ship Code Without Shipping Features
Feature flags separate deploying code from releasing it: merge unfinished work safely, try features yourself first, roll out gradually, and switch things off without a redeploy. A simple implementation, when to use a service, and how to stop flags becoming clutter.
Evals for Coding Agents: Measuring Whether Your Agent Setup Actually Works
Changing a CLAUDE.md, model, skill, or MCP server changes agent behaviour, usually untested. How to build an eval suite for coding-agent workflows: task selection, hermetic environments, graders, pass@k vs pass^k, cost and trajectory metrics, and running headless in CI.
Docker Compose for Local Development: App, Postgres, and Redis in One Command
A compose.yaml that starts your whole stack — app, database, cache, and workers — with one command. Services, networking by service name, volumes for data and code, health-checked startup order, env files, profiles, watch mode for live reload, and the pitfalls on macOS and Windows.
Can You Really Code on an iPad or Chromebook?
The keyboard is fine. The problem is that tablets and Chromebooks can't run your project's toolchain like a laptop. The approaches that work — SSH to a remote machine, browser editors, cloud workspaces, and AI agents doing the heavy lifting — and where each falls short.
Claude Code Skills: Turn the Prompts You Keep Retyping Into Commands
If you've pasted the same instructions into Claude Code more than twice, it should be a skill. How skills work, how they differ from CLAUDE.md, how to write one with arguments and live context, and four skills worth having in almost any project.
Claude Code Settings Explained: settings.json Scopes, Precedence, and a Team Setup
Claude Code reads settings from managed, command-line, local, project, and user files. Where each lives, which wins, how permission lists merge, what belongs in the committed project file vs your personal one, and a practical team configuration with permissions, hooks, and environment variables.
Claude Code Plan Mode: Make It Think Before It Types
The most expensive Claude Code mistakes happen in the first five minutes, when it confidently heads in the wrong direction. Plan mode makes it research and propose before touching anything. How to use it, how to review a plan properly, and when it's overkill.
Using Claude Code on a Large Codebase
On a big repository, Claude Code's quality depends on what's in its context. How to structure CLAUDE.md files across a monorepo, point it at the right code, delegate exploration to subagents, keep sessions focused, give it fast feedback loops, and plan multi-step changes that span many files.
How to Use Claude Code From Your Phone: Every Option Compared
You can check on — and steer — a Claude Code session from your phone in at least four different ways. They differ in where the code runs, what happens when your laptop sleeps, and how much you can actually do on a small screen.
Claude Code Checkpoints: How /rewind Works and What It Can't Undo
Press Esc twice and Claude Code rewinds its file edits to any earlier prompt. It's a genuine safety net — with holes shaped exactly like the mistakes that hurt most: shell commands, database changes, and anything outside the working tree. What's covered, what isn't, and what to use for the rest.
Web Accessibility Basics: Making Your App Usable by Everyone
Accessibility means people using screen readers, keyboards, magnification, or captions can use your app too. The common failures in AI-built apps — missing labels, div buttons, poor contrast, keyboard traps — how to test for them in ten minutes, and the prompts that fix them.
Why Your AI Agent Keeps Forgetting (And Why Bigger Context Windows Won't Fix It)
Your coding agent works brilliantly for twenty minutes, then forgets the architecture you explained. That's not a bug you can prompt your way out of — and million-token windows won't save you. What actually helps.
Why AI Coding Agents Need Persistent Workspaces
Stateless sandboxes make AI agents repeat themselves, lose context, and guess at results they could have measured. Persistent workspaces fix the feedback loop — here's the mechanism, and what it costs to build.
Cloud Development Environments vs Local Setup: An Honest Comparison
Cloud development environments fix onboarding, parity, and machine sprawl — and introduce latency, cost, and offline problems. A practical breakdown of when each one wins, without the vendor spin.