Seems like the main takeaway for the rest of us is these builds were already absurdly fast and they made them faster. They say “a few seconds” was 13% of the median build time. My C++ builds are significantly slower than 8x a few seconds.
If interruptions and meetings are the worst thing to break your flow then I feel like you haven't dealt with truly bad build systems where builds take multiple minutes to run on a good day.
Build times can be the most important factor if they take like 20 minutes. Which I actually have seen before, I've seen some monster C++ and Java builds in my time.
The developer experience is completely different in such an environment.
Mostly agreed, but don't discount tooling quality as a major source of flow-breakage.
There's often friction and lack of documentation about tooling. This results in much more frustrating flow-breakage IMO. This is something that we could fix but choose not to because we can't clearly articulate the loss from flow-breakage.
