12 Boring Infrastructure Improvements That Transformed Developer Productivity

I used to think infra wins were about scale.

The big flexes:

• “We run a 100-node Kubernetes cluster.”
• “Our Terraform pipeline deploys thousands of resources.”
• “Check out this CI/CD dashboard — it looks like a cockpit.”

I’ve been in rooms where people clap for that stuff.

But honestly those things rarely made my life as a developer any better.

The biggest infra wins I’ve seen in my career were boring.

Painfully boring.

Things you’d never show off at a conference, but that changed how our team worked every single day.

Here are some that stuck with me.

1. When We Killed Staging

We used to spend a fortune running staging environments. And of course, staging never behaved like prod.

The day we switched to ephemeral environments per PR was a game-changer.

• I could test a feature in a prod-like setup within minutes.
• No more hunting for bugs that only happen on staging.
• Finance stopped asking why infra costs looked like a second…