Reliability and performance in software tools

We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us — Marshall McLuhan.

It’s been a couple of years now since I discovered my deep passion for building developer tools. I’m particularly interested in tools that become an indispensable part of developers’ workflow. Most such tools have one thing in common: they provide exceptional developer experience.

I’m lucky that I work on developer tools at Netflix. As I grow into my career and gain more knowledge, I’ve started to develop mental models of software tools and what makes them particularly great.

Today, I’ll share some of those models, focused on software reliability and performance, which I think are the most important features of any software we build. I’ll also share some principles that I think could guide us in building reliable and performant software tools.

Why invest in tools

We developers love our tools and often spend hours and days customizing them for our workflow. We know it’s mostly justified, because it pays off (unless you’re me, who can spend a day choosing the right font for an editor). Anyway, every minute saved in our productivity compounds, in the long run, can have a huge impact, because it increases our velocity of delivering business value to users. Since tools that we create act as force-multipliers for developers and eventually for business, it should be of foremost importance to invest in our tools wisely.