Dev Experience For Personal Projects

My personal projects have poor developer experience. Any time I want to fix a bug or improve a service, I experience a lot of frustration.

For example, I wanted to upgrade the UI of my pomodoro script to have colors for completed and cancelled tasks, better prompts and mark the task status. I couldn't get how the original script worked and any change I made broke something. I added the features but the experience was painful. I didn't have another way to tell that I broke something except from running the script end to end.

I set up my first server manually, without documentation. There were a lot of experiments I did, which means it's impossible to create a similar setup in future or upgrade the same server. A better way would have been to document the set up, or put everything in code using ansible, with comments that explain non-obvious configurations.

I'll try and have at least these in my personal projects to help with dev experience:

• easy set up of project
• easy and fast testing
• clear documentation on manual and non-obvious steps
• documentation to run and build the project
• documentation on how I deployed the project
• explanation for non-obvious debugging steps