Month of Developer Productivity: Build and Forget

Final 12 months, at Cisco Stay 2025 in Las Vegas, I used to be reviewing the whole lot for my session “DEVNET-3707 – Community Telemetry and AI for Community Incident Response“. I at all times check my demos earlier than my session, so I may be calm realizing it’s going to work. Nevertheless, this time throughout testing, I observed the metrics in my Grafana dashboard weren’t displaying up. I panicked and began troubleshooting. After some time I discovered an error within the Python script that was amassing telemetry information utilizing NETCONF, however didn’t know why. Supposedly my script ought to at all times work whatever the setting but it surely was not working. As engineer, I deleted all of the containers I used, Grafana, Telegraf, InfluxDB and created them once more, again and again till it labored.

The demo labored and my session went effectively, however this was not one thing I needed to repeat. I at all times attempt to make my tasks observe my mantra of “construct and neglect” however I did discover that the script utilized by Telegraf was not following my mantra. I used Poetry at the moment and debugging it may take me some time.

After I say “construct and neglect”, I imply principally to create and configure your tasks in a method that you could construct them as soon as and neglect about them as a result of they work each single time. That is how I wish to construct and that is what I needed to share in my month of developer productiveness sequence on our YouTube channel. It covers the developer productiveness instruments builders and engineers have to cease preventing their setting and begin coding.

Within the first video I present the right way to set your setting like a professional. As soon as your setting is ready, video 2 makes positive your IDE catches errors earlier than they trigger issues. Even with all of that, issues nonetheless go improper, so video 3 offers you the instruments to search out out why. And when it really works, video 4 makes positive it really works in every single place, not simply in your machine.

Video 1 – Your Dev Atmosphere

In my first video, “Set Up Your Dev Atmosphere Like a Professional,” I share some helpful VS Code extensions and settings, together with how Distant Explorer with distant.SSH.defaultExtensions can assist you get your setting on a VM straight away and in the event you configure your SSH consumer to ahead your SSH keys, it looks like magic; having a whole setting along with your favourite extensions in a model new VM able to push to GitHub straight away. And in the event you use containers as a substitute, Dev Containers are the way in which to go. Right here you possibly can outline your setting (together with your extensions) in a devcontainer.json file and have it prepared in seconds. Better of all, this configuration is model managed and everybody who clones your repo can have the identical setting. Yow will discover the video right here, together with the right way to configure your OpenSSH consumer: Watch the video

Video 2 – Make Your IDE Work for You

After you have your setting prepared, it’s nice to ensure your IDE is doing the give you the results you want with easy however very highly effective instruments. In my expertise, if you don’t use these instruments, it is rather arduous to observe the code and perceive what’s going on. In my second video I configure formatters like Prettier and Black, linters like Pylint, Ruff and sort checkers like Pylance and ty. Each time you save your Python code, Black codecs it properly, Ruff and Pylint examine for errors, Pylance and ty examine for kind errors. And with editor.codeActionsOnSave set to supply.fixAll: “express” and editor.formatOnSave set to true, Ruff may even repair a number of the errors for you, each time you save your code. The second video is right here: Watch the video

Video 3 – Debug Like You Imply It

After the setting and your IDE are executed, a fairly widespread job is to debug your code. Errors are so widespread, particularly when coping with distant information buildings like YANG fashions, the place you don’t have a transparent REST API schema and also you solely have the YANG schema, which isn’t that simple to observe. Right here a debugger is right on condition that relying on how your system is configured, the info you expect may be lacking. The launch.json file helps you configure your debugger so, with a easy F5, you can begin debugging your code rapidly. Breakpoints, watch expressions, the debug console (REPL), conditional breakpoints and logpoints are a few of your greatest associates when issues go south and also you don’t know why. In my third video I clarify the launch.json file and undergo these debugger instruments: Watch the video

Video 4 – Ship It Anyplace

Lastly, it’s time to ship your code, and one thing that contradicts my mantra “construct and neglect” is the “it solely works on my laptop” thought. The “neglect” half applies wherever, your laptop computer, your coworker’s laptop computer, a server, a pipeline, and many others. In case you are growing with Python, I’ve discovered that uv is nice for reproducible builds. Use it accurately and you’ll at all times have the identical dependencies and identical setting, so your code will at all times work. Overlook about points with dependencies which might be damaged and usually are not in your management, the dependency hell. However uv alone will not be sufficient, to get probably the most out of uv you would possibly want to make use of particular flags and instructions which with time you’ll neglect (no less than I do), that’s why uv + make is a good mixture. I solely have to recollect easy instructions like make construct and make run and the Makefile will deal with the remaining. And in the event you put that on a container, you may be positive it’s going to run wherever. I cowl this very helpful sample in my fourth video: Watch the video

Bear in mind the mantra “construct and neglect” and apply it to your tasks; it’s going to make your life simpler. I’ve been following this mantra for all my newer tasks and so they simply work, and I can calm down.