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Why Reducing Your Project’s Build Time Matters
As developers, one of our primary tasks is waiting. We wait for our code to compile, our tests to run, to verify our work, we wait for our application to deploy and load, and to navigate to the page we are changing.
I have joined many teams that were either stuck with or content with a lot of waiting. Often, I found that these wait times very fixable and I was able to make significant improvements. This series will cover some of the strategies that I use when trying to improve build times and workflows. But to start with, in part 1, I want to address the question ‘why we should care about slow builds and workflows?’.
Spending time to save a few seconds might not seem worthwhile. However, those gained seconds can slowly accumulate to get you over some thresholds that can trigger a dramatic change in how you work. You can reduce context shifts, enter a flow state, free up your mental space to focus on your actual tasks, and make the best of your limited amount of time each day.
Thresholds
In my experience, the time we spend waiting for our builds to compile and our application to load can fall into three distinct categories. In the first category, the wait is unobtrusive; we have an unbroken chain of thought and we switch seamlessly between making changes and trialling them. In the…
