Personal tips for web developers

I'm barely even an average developer in Seattle so I'm hardly qualified to give advice, but here are some things that have helped me out recently.

Saving Money on AWS bill

If your business is using AWS S3 for file storage, you are basically paying double what you need to. Turn on bucket analytics to see usage patterns, and then come up with either an archiving strategy using Glacier/Deep Archive for 80%/96% savings, or Intelligent Tiering or Infrequent Access for ~50% savings. IT/IA takes seconds to turn on with a lifecycle policy, so long as long as your files aren't being accessed very often, they are a no-brainer.

Bash aliases

For any process that you wind up doing multiple times, write a bash function alias as so you don't have to type as much.

kubectl exec -ti -n namespace -other-flag blah bash

Can just be replaced with a single letter like "b" for bash.

For configuring different flavors of development environment, save environment variables in a folder with a static absolute path, and then write bash aliases that start those kinds of development server by copying those files into your web application folder instantly like "staging-direct" or "local-production".

Use CI/CD

You are wasting a huge amount of time and energy if you have to manually deploy or run tests. 100 minutes on Github Actions are still not as expensive as ten minutes of developer time. Automate as much of this process as possible.