I think the author misses the mark about what the problem is with developer experience, although they get the analogy of a "rainforest" correct.<p>Developers are in a run-away-train kind of situation, where they think that more libraries, more frameworks, more tools, more languages, more abstractions, etc. is the key to a better developer experience. In reality, this is the exact thing that is making development and developers miserable. The whole `is_even` fiasco [0] should have been a wake up call.<p>The plain fact of software development is that there is going to be complexity, and there is going to be some point where adding features or fixing things is going to become a slog. The choice <i>where</i> do you want that to happen? With the never-ending reliance on libraries, frameworks, tools, etc. the difficulties has been shifted towards the latter half of development, "we'll worry about that later". Sure, the share holders and the angel investors are stoked when a team can get an app running in a few months. But guess what, down the road when it comes time to add more features, make it fast, to flesh out the app into its full potential...it will end up in a nightmare of trying to wrestle the code and the barely comprehensible infrastructure to get it to do what they want. Good luck trying to figure out what is making the app slow in that rainforest.<p>The best thing I ever did for my mental health when working on hobby projects was to keep it simple stupid. In the case of C++ and games, I do everything in my own code maybe using Sean Barret's header files or GLFW for Window and input. Use a .bat file to build the code, rather than some overly complicated build tool so that it can build in 2 seconds rather than 5 minutes giving me very fast iteration speed. The Vulkan rendering code, the math, system level stuff like memory and file IO is all my own. For web stuff, I wrote a production web app for an internal team in a single PHP file with only a templating library. Going this route has undoubtedly doubled my productivity. Static site generator? I'd rather write one in Python than try to figure out some complex dependency ridden mess of an open source tool that never does what I want it to do.<p>The pain of developer experience is self inflicted. In an effort to reduce friction in development, a system of increasingly worse friction has been introduced. Programmers need to stop being afraid of writing code, and, dare I say stop being lazy. Developers could be just as productive, if not more productive, if they would just write the code.<p>[0] <a href="https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code/" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-...</a>