What are the boring parts of software development?
Hey HN, we are building Dosu (https://dosu.dev/) to help software engineers with all the boring, "engineering knowledge work" that happens outside the IDE.
Everything from fielding technical questions from sales to helping product groom the backlog.
What types of boring "engineering knowledge work" would you like to see automated?
Code documentation and overall project documentation are boring to do, yet required for long term success of any software project. It helps with on-boarding new engineers as well as maintaining a log of what transpired over the previous months and years and why certain choices were made. I would also include all team communication over slack, jira, bug trackers etc into this documentation. Writing it, Organizing it, Enhancing it, Updating it and sifting through them is extremely boring work. I have to dig out old e-mails or messages from the ERP from old colleagues if the documentation does not match the actual features, now that is really boring.
Product managers that basically do nothing. Know nothing. Then push it onto the engineers to do their job. Its rife. Analysts much the same (depends on the job of course, but very common).
Keeping up with 1000 slack notifications per day.
Writing tests, making configurations, CI/CD setup, DevOps (Docker, Kubernates), Systems Admin, Designing schemas, debugging.
Anything that doesn't have anything todo solving the core problem.
I suspect this is why NoSql & serverless platforms have become so popular.
The fact that I don't have to think about schemas & systems admin so much made them so attractive to me.
Not sure if my answer qualifies but I make iPhone and Android apps (I am the developer of HACK for hacker news) and part of it also involves me designing the App Store metadata (screenshots, writing the description, researching keywords, app icon design etc). I find it very boring.
I work alone, on software that supports my main business. I have fewer collaboration and scaling issues.
I find ops tedious. Simple things like serving a website or monitoring uptime and builds is slow and annoying. However if I don't automate those things I have to do them myself. I find it hard to get all the important messages pushed to me instead of checking a bunch of different things.
Sometimes it feels like there's a bunch of yak shaving involved in making your code run in production.
Over discussion over mundane things .
Rituals that are there because some manual says so...
Dailies that turn into micromanagement...
Anything that has no meaning.
Dealing with customers and managers.
Design documents are my bane now
Honestly, I think everything from coding to documentation to testing to setting up the dev environment, and infrastructure very boring. I just want to create products that solve problems!
It's common knowledge that documentation bugs most people i guess. Congrats on building stuff!