Final yr, at Cisco Dwell 2025 in Las Vegas, I used to be reviewing the whole lot 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 figuring out it’ll work. Nonetheless, this time throughout testing, I seen the metrics in my Grafana dashboard weren’t exhibiting up. I panicked and began troubleshooting. After some time I discovered an error within the Python script that was accumulating telemetry information utilizing NETCONF, however didn’t know why. Supposedly my script ought to all the time work whatever the atmosphere however it was not working. As a very good engineer, I deleted all of the containers I used, Grafana, Telegraf, InfluxDB and created them once more, time and again till it labored.
The demo labored and my session went properly, however this was not one thing I needed to repeat. I all the time attempt to make my initiatives observe my mantra of “construct and overlook” 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 overlook”, I imply mainly to create and configure your initiatives in a manner that you could construct them as soon as and overlook about them as a result of they work each single time. That is how I prefer to construct and that is what I needed 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 atmosphere and begin coding.
Within the first video I present how you can set your atmosphere like a professional. As soon as your atmosphere is about, video 2 makes certain your IDE catches errors earlier than they trigger issues. Even with all of that, issues nonetheless go fallacious, so video 3 provides you the instruments to seek out out why. And when it really works, video 4 makes certain it really works in every single 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 atmosphere on a VM straight away and if you happen to configure your SSH consumer to ahead your SSH keys, it appears like magic; having an entire atmosphere together with your favourite extensions in a model new VM able to push to GitHub instantly. And if you happen to use containers as an alternative, Dev Containers are the way in which to go. Right here you possibly can outline your atmosphere (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 atmosphere. You could find the video right here, together with how you can configure your OpenSSH consumer: Watch the video
Video 2 – Make Your IDE Work for You
After getting your atmosphere 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, whenever you don’t use these instruments, it is extremely laborious to observe the code and perceive what’s going on. In my second video I configure formatters like Prettier and Black, linters like Pylint, Ruff and kind checkers like Pylance and ty. Each time you save your Python code, Black codecs it properly, Ruff and Pylint examine for errors, Pylance and ty examine for sort errors. And with editor.codeActionsOnSave set to supply.fixAll: "specific" and editor.formatOnSave set to true, Ruff may even repair among 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 atmosphere and your IDE are executed, a reasonably widespread job 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 straightforward to observe. Right here a debugger is right on condition that relying on how your machine is configured, the information you expect is likely to be lacking. The launch.json file helps you configure your debugger so, with a easy F5, you can begin debugging your code shortly. Breakpoints, watch expressions, the debug console (REPL), conditional breakpoints and logpoints are a few of your finest buddies 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 Anyplace
Lastly, it’s time to ship your code, and one thing that contradicts my mantra “construct and overlook” is the “it solely works on my laptop” concept. The “overlook” half applies wherever, your laptop computer, your coworker’s laptop computer, a server, a pipeline, and so forth. If you’re growing with Python, I’ve discovered that uv is nice for reproducible builds. Use it accurately and you’ll all the time have the identical dependencies and similar atmosphere, so your code will all the time work. Neglect about points with dependencies which might be damaged and usually are not in your management, the dependency hell. However uv alone isn’t sufficient, to get essentially the most out of uv you would possibly want to make use of particular flags and instructions which with time you’ll overlook (not less than I do), that’s why uv + make is a good mixture. I solely have to recollect easy instructions like make construct and make run and the Makefile will handle the remainder. And if you happen to put that on a container, you might be certain it’ll run wherever. I cowl this very helpful sample in my fourth video: Watch the video
Bear in mind the mantra “construct and overlook” and apply it to your initiatives; it’ll make your life simpler. I’ve been following this mantra for all my newer initiatives and so they simply work, and I can calm down.
Assets
Listed here are among the assets I discussed within the movies:
Add any questions or feedback you might have in regards to the movies or the weblog. I will probably be blissful to reply them.
