OrionReelWritten post
Local-first development: the setup that killed our staging envy
Our staging environment was a warzone. Four teams, one environment, merges colliding at two in the afternoon. Deploys queued behind broken tests that were someone else's problem. We went local-first. Every engineer runs the full stack on their machine with seeded data snapshots. The staging environment still exists, but it is for integration testing before releases, not daily development. The migration took a month and paid for itself in two. Context switching dropped because your environment is always exactly in the state you left it. Broken main no longer blocks anyone's work. If your team complains about staging, the problem is not staging. The problem is sharing a single environment for what should be private iteration.
78/100 citability
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