The shorter the feedback loop, the better

When it comes to web developer experience, few things impact satisfaction levels as significantly as the length of the feedback loop.

The time between making a change to the code and seeing the result can make or break the experience of using a tool.

Any time you’re considering injecting a tool or process between writing the source code and being able to view the final product, you’ll want to be mindful of how much time it adds to the feedback loop.

That’s why bugs that only occur on production are so frustrating. Even if you have transparency in to the production environment, the need to wait for a deployment process to complete before seeing whether your fix has worked is torture for a Front-End Developer.

It also explains our obsession with runtime environments and build tools that claim to be faster than their predecessors.