Comment Magic Builds! (Score 1) 279
Ugh, I hate magic builds. You know, the kind that only build on a single developer's workstation using code that's not pushed to the central git server. Unacceptable. The only solution is to insist that all software be buildable on a vanilla machine, but most cowboy devs don't like edicts too much.
The way to fix the cowboys is to give them a gift. A gift that takes away their goddamn high horse. That gift is an automated build tool that automatically builds and deploys their pushed changes to the dev environment. That way, their laziness can override their egos and they accept the tool, but in order to use the tool, they have to spend the extra few minutes scripting their builds properly and an extra few seconds pushing their code.
The effects at my current client have been awesome. No more, "Oh, Bob has to do a build because he's the only one who can do it." Or "only Frank has the latest changes." Or "Oh, the build script is this word doc that might be up to date, but then, it might not be." Or "Oh, the production code isn't quite committed to git yet. It's on Chuck's laptop."
Yuck.