Papercuts

Improving tooling, documentation, or dev loops. A tiny amount of time fixing a papercut in the right way can save hundreds of users hours of debugging or schlepping through inefficient workflows. https://www.benkuhn.net/impact/

Often it is way too easy to look past these papercuts or just accept them for being “the way things are”. They all add up but when the focus of the task is on something else, often you forget these things. Sometimes though they’re things that are just that little bit too difficult to fix or the solution is unclear so they go unfixed for a long time, sometimes forever. For example a proper dev environment is a huge multiplier for everyone on the team but setting it up correctly is a serious undertaking and if it is not done correctly from the start then it can be ignored often to the detriment of everyone. But because it is not a simple fix then everyone is unhappily going along with it because they can’t see a better way out

I agree with a lot of the stuff in the original post and is well worth the read.