May you think developer tools are only relevant to the personal behaviors of developers. From my prior experiences, developer tools may impact the teams collaboration, reliability of applications and even business outcome.
In this article, I will talk about why developer tools matters.
Mind pattern of a team
A shared mind pattern of a team is the lubricant of smooth communication. If a team can form an agreement on a code boilerplate generator, developers of the team can foster a shared mind set of how their code will be structured. Standardization of engineering practices is your friend if you want to scale your development team quickly when your business expands. When I started my project, my team and I only focuses on the features delivery to meet business requirements, and we only had 6 team members, and each of us has an our own set of tools and development habits. In the name of polyglot of Microservices, some of services are constructed in varied ways. As our business grows, the code maintenance workload becomes overwhelming and new features delivery were dragged behind because developers have to spend hours to understand services that are developed by his/her peers. Besides the learning cost, when we try to build the CI/CD pipelines, because of varied code structure, multiple pipelines are needed.
Service reliability
Service reliability are often ignored at the beginning. You must often hear saying of "Let's focus on the features first and fix the reliability issue when business is impacted". By saying this, reliability of services are often ignored until something really bad happens. Reliability must be considered at the beginning. Developer tools often have the reliability features included, that means we can use the tool to have the service built in the correct way so that the reliability features are included inherently.
Service security
Security and reliability are often interconnected. A shared framework and development toolset can enable the authentication, authorization, encryption, key management, and etc inherently. By doing this, the security review are much more efficient. Developers can focus on what really matters to the business logic.
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