Smart notifications and nudges are table stakes tools for developers looking to streamline their work and stay focused on building improvements. These automatic alerts are key to a more efficient workflow, freeing us from the burden of repetitive, overwhelming, and time critical tasks — aka, toil.

Amid an AI boom and developing research, machine learning (ML) models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Midjourney’s generative text-to-image model have radically shifted the natural language processing (NLP) and image processing landscape. Due to this new and powerful technology, developing and deploying ML models has quickly become the new frontier for software development.

In an ideal world CI pipelines would never fail and deployments would be easy to navigate. The reality is that the journey from commit to production can fail in subtle ways that can be hard to understand. And this problem is multiplied by the number of pipelines in your system.

Building full-stack applications can be challenging, especially when developing the backend and frontend at the same time. In this scenario, frontend teams may have to wait for the backend team to finish building an API before they implement. This is where Mirage.js comes in. In this tutorial, you will explore how to use Mirage.js in frontend applications and mock backend requests for services that have not yet been developed.

Every team has guardrails, whether you recognize them or not. They’re a form of automation that can have significant impact on your software development process and the people doing the work. They’re another way to give toil the boot and keep developers in the flow. We’ve made the case for engineering automation in a previous article; here’s how guardrails as automations ensure that agreed upon boundaries and ways of working are codified into team processes.