r/softwaredevelopment

Not sure if this is a software dev thing or just me.

Lately I noticed even after I close my laptop and finish for the day, my brain doesn't actually stop.

Random bugs pop back into my head. Things I forgot to do. Ideas for cleaner solutions. Conversations from standups. Stuff I wasn't even thinking about during work suddenly starts showing up at night.

The weird part is I’m physically tired, but mentally it feels like something is still running in the background.

Almost like I ended my shift but forgot to close a bunch of tabs in my head.

Anyone else get this?

And if yes… what actually helps you switch out of "developer mode"?

Pm here, I know estimates are a fairy tale, but I'm wondering

Should I ask developers to estimate Raw coding time so then I can do simple math like add focus factor + buffers

Or ask them to estimate fully done, after deployment and qa? I'm worried that this question is too loaded and that their accuracy would be more precise if they only estimated raw code.

Hey everyone, my college fees are due at the end of this term, and I’m currently looking for some freelance work to make a bit of extra money ($60-70).

If anyone needs a website, feel free to contact me. I can build full-stack websites including frontend, backend, responsive UI, dashboards, portfolios, landing pages, and more.

if interested I will share my portfolio

Even small projects would really help right now. Thanks ❤️

I am thinking of buying a macbook pro/ air. I am gonna use this device as my work laptop for freelance developlement, side projects etc. Due to budget constraints and logistics reasons this needs to be my personal device also, place where I manage my homelab, I have my passwords stored, personal emails logged in, sensitive media downloaded etc. I am okay to shell a few more bucks for getting extra ram, because that will be constraining factor.

Based on the comparatively frequent supply chain attacks, AI agents crawling everything on your device (I know this can be prevented with a little attention) I think its better to have isolation of work and personal space. It might be paranoia I understand, but I am irked. I also prefer to have a clean device of personal use, like no over the time heaps of applications, configs etc. Its might be better to delete or redo VMs. I say might because I haven't actually done it yet.

So what I am thinking of having a ubuntu VM on my mac where I will be doing heavy fullstack development with around 10 docker containers, 30 chrome tabs, slack, teams, frontend ui server, vscode and intellij ide. I can maybe shift communication apps like teams, slack to the main computer for meetings only. But i really prefer it to be inside VM.

Is someone else also doing this? Is this achievable? Is this just paranoia? Any other ways to get complete isolation like having a mac mini for work and remote into this machine? I live in a developing nation, internet infra is not very reliable across the whole country.

I've been using Base44 to build an app but wish to learn how to create stuff without the need of it but dont want it start from complete zero on the app I've been making with it.

I do wish to eventually publish the app in the app store.

So my question is how difficult of a task did I create myself and does anyone have any advice to help smooth this nonsense.

No documentation. No comments. Variables named temp1, data_final, and do_not_touch. The entire infrastructure is held together by a single bash script written in 2018 by an engineer who left the company three years ago.

Every time I open a pull request to fix a basic typo, I feel like I'm cutting a wire on a bomb. How do you even begin to refactor a system that functions purely on vibes and prayers?

I wrote an Enterprise application suite and I'm now at a crossroad.

Which do you prefer:

• self-contained web service installer that walks you through install (endpoint, port, db, etc), and can received hotfix patches.
  • commonly uses a dedicated server, but can be multi-purpose. The issue remains it gives less visibility when granular view and control is expected.
• IIS web site with manual configuration and upgrades. This requires a more manual process for host header site binding, cert, permissions, etc.
  • Restores full control to the admin, but as expected, upgrades are not as simple as the aforementioned.

Please consider not only which method you prefer to work with, but also which one management would find more enticing.

Thank you.

Is there a psychological term for a management team that considers a 2-day testing phase "too slow," but willingly spends 2 weeks in emergency war rooms fixing completely preventable regressions?

Asking from a very on-fire Slack channel.

I have been given a feature to build and I have completed all the backend work, including creating all the APIs and their impl.

However, I’m facing a performance issue. The main API internally calls three other APIs. Individually, each API takes around 500ms, but due to several conditions and processing logic, the overall response time of my API becomes 2-4 seconds.

There are no direct DB calls in my API, but the downstream APIs I’m calling perform DB operations internally. I have already implemented session caching, which helps for repeated requests, but during refreshes, first-time hits, or when new keys are generated, the response time still becomes quite high.

I was considering using multithreading/parallel API calls to improve performance. However, the first and second API calls are dependent on each other, while only the third one is independent. I’m also a bit reluctant to introduce multithreading because of some bad past experiences with concurrency issues.

Does anyone have suggestions on how I can further optimize or improve the response time in this kind of scenario?

Here's the pitch: you brief an AI agent before a meeting, it joins the call as a bot, participates in the chat, and sends you a full debrief after.

I built this as a mockup to see if people actually want it before I go deeper. Some of it works, some of it is rough around the edges.

What works right now:

- Give it context (who you are, why the meeting matters), key points you want raised, and questions you need answered

- It joins Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams as a named bot ("John (Imposter)")

- Posts a welcome message introducing itself and your agenda.

- Actively participates in chat : answers if someone asks it something directly, confirms when your questions get answered, raises your key points when the topic comes up

- Sends a debrief at the end: summary, action items, and direct answers to your questions

- You can send it immediately or schedule it for a specific time

Quick way to test it:

Create a Google Meet (or Zoom/Teams), paste the link in, fill in some context and questions, and hit send. If you don't set a schedule it joins immediately you'll just need to admit it from the waiting room. Takes about 30 seconds to set up. Talk for a few minutes and see what it picks up.

What I want to build next (if people use it) :

- The bot uses voice to speak in the call.

- Google Calendar integration so it auto-joins without you doing anyting

- Upload documents/briefs so the agent has richer context

- Claude workspace / Teams integration

- Better proactive participation

Try it: https://imposter-silk.vercel.app , you get one free meeting, no credit card.

Is this something worth pursuing or nah ?

Hi all,

I’m involved with software releases at my company and we’ve run into an issue with semantic versioning (major.minor.patch) lately. We support multiple versions of our software and release monthly patches across versions (i.e 2.2.3, 5.0.4, 6.1.1). The issue is future planning versioning when it comes to urgent releases, or hotfixes.

For example, we’ll communicate to our engineering teams that the next versions are 2.2.3 with a certain target start date of February 1. Then, a week before, we’ll discover an issue where we need to quickly ship something, and that takes the place of 2.2.3, where 2.2.3 becomes an urgent release with one significant fix.

As a result, we need to communicate to hundreds of engineers the change, and update hundreds of tickets to now point to 2.2.4. This happens frequently across all versions. We’ve talked about using date anchored releases with ambiguous versions such as 2.2.X (Feb-1) where we can add the version when we’re confident on the number. But I’m not sure if that’s the best idea. Curious if other folks have solved this similar problem? TIA!

Been seeing this question come up with teams that attempt to retrofit their workflows for agents.

“Why keep test plans / stories / product context in code? Just expose Jira through MCP tools.”

Something like:

• list_stories
• get_story
• update_story

Voila! Technically the agent now has access to everything.

But access ≠ understanding.

The difference is similar to someone who has "read the entire library" vs someone "with a library card".

A library card technically gives access to every book. But someone who has actually read the library understands relationships, patterns, structure, context, etc.

Apply the same logic to your code. Imagine your codebase was stored as individual files, in a remote SaaS, and accessed purely via MCP tools:

• list_files
• read_file
• upsert_file

Technically your agent has the entire codebase available. But practically, losing out a bunch of capabilities:

• local indexing optimized for retrieval
• folder structure as implicit context
• grep/find across everything
• reading nearby context naturally
• faster iteration during multi-step reasoning for chain of thought

The agent doesn’t just access the code - it starts understanding the shape of it.

The same principle apply to product knowledge too. If stories, tests, and knowledge lived in a native/code-like form, agents can build a richer model of the business instead of pulling one record at a time through tools.

Curious if others have thought about this.

Do people think MCP + tools is sufficient? Or is there something fundamentally different about agents having native/local access to structured context?

written in nodejs with pnpm

try it by running:

npx rebar-js init

Github

npm package link

I've been a software engineer for 12 years, I am pretty good at finding work for myself when there is downtime. But my current company definitely has a pattern with our features:

1. We need to get this done as soon as possible, can we do it RIGHT NOW??

2. We scramble to get to work, then realize everything is extremely vague, and send it back for better requirements gathering

3. Multiple weeks can sometimes go by where we hear nothing. Several different features in varying states of readiness, leaving us to just do basic testing or come up with work on our own while we wait

4. Suddenly after weeks of silence, the product people realize the release date is in a week and they haven't given us requirements, they scramble to put it together, and then we have to finish everything in a week.

Sometimes it's better than this, but as of right now I have 3 things I'm working on, and all of them are waiting on other people. I have tech debt I can tackle, but making up my own work, knowing it could be interrupted at any moment by a "crisis" is frustrating.

hey guys,

i just finished building an offline dictionary for spanish and french and its abt 5gb on my laptop. can anyone guide me how i publish this for others to download and for me to download as an app too because right now i have to go into x64 CMD for Visual Studio 2022 and then paste in a command and then it runs after a while.

would appreciate some detailed help tysm everyone

I can't get the trunk-based development flow. I understand the advantages for introducing new features to the app (flags are good for A/B testing, fewer merge conflicts).

But I can't understand how developers do refactoring with trunk-based flags. Also, do the flags stay there forever, or what is the best flow for this?

Can you give me a deep dive into how your teams handle this in production?