Why Reducing Your Project’s Build Time Matters
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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 second category, we are waiting long enough that we notice, and our train of thought is broken. We notice the boredom and feel the temptation to context shift. In the final category, we predict that the wait will be too long and alt-tab to find something else to do while we wait.
The size of these three thresholds varies from person to person, as well as from day to day. I tend to find that I will notice a wait longer than 15 seconds and feel the urge to context shift around 45 seconds.
Each category forms a tipping point of sorts; small improvements add up to a much more dramatic shift.
Reduce context shifting
When faced with a long wait, we tend to start doing multiple tasks in parallel. We might start trying to chip away at the rest of the tasks we have to do, or perhaps just staving off boredom. We’ll alternate between writing code and reading through a pull request…
