With enough careful effort, it’s possible to become unblockable. In other words, you can put yourself in a position where you’re always able to make forward…

Do whatever it takes to have a stable and reliable developer environment. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of this. The stability of your developer environment directly determines how much of a workday you can spend actually doing work.

For instance, use as normal a developer stack as possible. At GitHub, most development is done in Codespaces, a platform for server-hosted dev containers. You can connect to a codespace with almost any IDE, but the majority of people use VSCode, so I use VSCode, with as few plugins as possible2. I think a lot of developers are too focused on their personal “top speed” with their developer environment when everything is working great, and under-emphasize how much time they spend tweaking config, patching dotfiles, and troubleshooting in general.

Fix developer environment problems as quickly as production incidents. If you can’t run tests or run a local server, don’t half-ass the troubleshooting process - focus on it until it’s fixed. On the flip side, don’t treat it as a leisurely learning experience (say, about how MacOS handles Dockerized networking). In many circumstances you’re probably better off tearing down and re-creating everything than digging in and trying to patch the specific issue.

Tons of other great advice in here too.

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