Developer Tools
Developer Tools That Earn Their Keep
Elena Ford
4 min readLast updated Jun 28, 2026
Tooling should shorten the distance between writing a line of code and knowing whether it works. Judged by that single rule, most of our stack was replaceable.
Keep: fast test runners and typed boundaries
A suite that finishes in under thirty seconds gets run. One that takes ten minutes gets skipped, and a skipped test is worse than no test because it implies coverage that does not exist.
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Cut: dashboards nobody opens
Alerts over charts
If a metric matters, page someone when it moves. If it does not matter enough to page, it probably does not need a panel either.
#tools#productivity#testing#ci#developer experience
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