Anti-patterns for local development

Irregular commits: Sporadic or large commits can lead to lost progress, complicates the tracking of changes, and reduces the ability to roll back to a specific state. Frequently committing locally enables you to experiment fearlessly, knowing that there is a secure point to return to. Bundling large changes, or combining multiple changes, into a single, large batched commit should be avoided. This practice also usually leads to having larger commits to the main releasable branch of the repository, making it difficult to integrate with other changes, perform code reviews, and deploy with confidence. It is best practice to commit small, logical changes more frequently.

Avoiding local development environments: Avoiding the use of local environments can result in teams making changes directly in production or having multiple developers share a single development account. This restricts developers from safely experimenting and testing their code changes and can result in increased risk of errors, service disruption, and integration issues that make troubleshooting complex. Set up individual local development environments for each developer.

Inconsistent local environment setup: Allowing each developer to set up their local environment without following a standardized process can lead to variations across developer setups. Divergent environments can introduce hard-to-diagnose bugs and the notorious it works on my machine scenarios, which can impact overall team productivity. Use automated tools, scripts, and playbooks to help ensure that the team has consistent local development environment setups.

Long-lived development branches: Maintaining long-lived development branches for the purpose of continuously deploying to local environments can lead to merge conflicts, increased technical debt, and divergence from the main code base. To keep the development environment as close to the production setup as possible, deployments to the environment should always be sourced from the main releasable branch which reflects the integrated code base used for production deployments.

Over-reliance on basic text editors: Relying solely on traditional text editors such as VI or Emacs for development activities. While these editors have their merits and uses, they fall short of the capabilities provided by modern IDEs and text editors that are capable of improving developer experience. Use IDEs and text editors that provide a vast plugin ecosystem and can be tailored to specific development tasks and integrate with automated tools.