Final yr, at Cisco Dwell 2025 in Las Vegas, I used to be reviewing every thing for my session “DEVNET-3707 – Community Telemetry and AI for Community Incident Response“. I all the time check my demos earlier than my session, so I might be calm understanding it should work. Nonetheless, this time throughout testing, I observed the metrics in my Grafana dashboard weren’t displaying up. I panicked and began troubleshooting. After some time I discovered an error within the Python script that was gathering telemetry information utilizing NETCONF, however didn’t know why. Supposedly my script ought to all the time work whatever the surroundings nevertheless it was not working. As a great engineer, I deleted all of the containers I used, Grafana, Telegraf, InfluxDB and created them once more, again and again till it labored.
The demo labored and my session went effectively, however this was not one thing I wished to repeat. I all the time attempt to make my tasks observe my mantra of “construct and neglect” however I did discover that the script utilized by Telegraf was not following my mantra. I used Poetry at the moment and debugging it may take me some time.
Once I say “construct and neglect”I imply principally to create and configure your tasks in a means which you can construct them as soon as and neglect about them as a result of they work each single time. That is how I prefer to construct and that is what I wished to share in my month of developer productiveness collection on our YouTube channel. It covers the developer productiveness instruments builders and engineers have to cease preventing their surroundings and begin coding.
Within the first video I present how one can set your surroundings like a professional. As soon as your surroundings is ready, video 2 makes positive your IDE catches errors earlier than they trigger issues. Even with all of that, issues nonetheless go unsuitable, so video 3 provides you the instruments to seek out out why. And when it really works, video 4 makes positive it really works all over the place, not simply in your machine.
Video 1 – Your Dev Atmosphere
In my first video, “Set Up Your Dev Atmosphere Like a Professional,” I share some helpful VS Code extensions and settings, together with how Distant Explorer with distant.SSH.defaultExtensions may help you get your surroundings on a VM instantly and in the event you configure your SSH consumer to ahead your SSH keys, it seems like magic; having an entire surroundings along with your favourite extensions in a model new VM able to push to GitHub right away. And in the event you use containers as a substitute, Dev Containers are the way in which to go. Right here you may outline your surroundings (together with your extensions) in a devcontainer.json file and have it prepared in seconds. Better of all, this configuration is model managed and everybody who clones your repo can have the identical surroundings. You’ll find the video right here, together with how one can configure your OpenSSH consumer: Watch the video
Video 2 – Make Your IDE Work for You
After getting your surroundings prepared, it’s nice to verify your IDE is doing the be just right for you with easy however very highly effective instruments. In my expertise, while you don’t use these instruments, it is vitally onerous to observe the code and perceive what’s going on. In my second video I configure formatters like Prettier and Blacklinters like Pylint, Ruff and sort checkers like Pylance and ty. Each time you save your Python code, Black codecs it properly, Ruff and Pylint test for errors, Pylance and ty test for kind errors. And with editor.codeActionsOnSave set to supply.fixAll: "express" and editor.formatOnSave set to trueRuff may even repair a number of the errors for you, each time you save your code. The second video is right here: Watch the video
Video 3 – Debug Like You Imply It
After the surroundings and your IDE are completed, a fairly widespread activity is to debug your code. Errors are so widespread, particularly when coping with distant information constructions like YANG fashions, the place you don’t have a transparent REST API schema and also you solely have the YANG schema, which isn’t that simple to observe. Right here a debugger is right on condition that relying on how your gadget is configured, the information you expect could be lacking. The launch.json file helps you configure your debugger so, with a easy F5, you can begin debugging your code rapidly. Breakpoints, watch expressions, the debug console (REPL), conditional breakpoints and logpoints are a few of your greatest pals when issues go south and also you don’t know why. In my third video I clarify the launch.json file and undergo these debugger instruments: Watch the video
Video 4 – Ship It Wherever
Lastly, it’s time to ship your code, and one thing that contradicts my mantra “construct and neglect” is the “it solely works on my pc” thought. The “neglect” half applies anyplace, your laptop computer, your coworker’s laptop computer, a server, a pipeline, and so on. In case you are growing with Python, I’ve discovered that uv is nice for reproducible builds. Use it appropriately and you’ll all the time have the identical dependencies and identical surroundings, so your code will all the time work. Overlook about points with dependencies which are damaged and will not be in your management, the dependency hell. However uv alone is just not sufficient, to get probably the most out of uv you would possibly want to make use of particular flags and instructions which with time you’ll neglect (at the very least I do), that’s why uv + make is a superb mixture. I solely have to recollect easy instructions like make construct and make run and the Makefile will handle the remaining. And in the event you put that on a container, you might be positive it should run anyplace. I cowl this very helpful sample in my fourth video: Watch the video
Bear in mind the mantra “construct and neglect” and apply it to your tasks; it should make your life simpler. I’ve been following this mantra for all my newer tasks and so they simply work, and I can loosen up.
Assets
Listed here are a number of the sources I discussed within the movies:
Add any questions or feedback you have got concerning the movies or the weblog. I can be joyful to reply them.
