After years of back-end development there's a thing which keeps bugging me: how little "interactive" the development process can be.
When I did front-end I took for granted that the application I was developing was easy to run so I could immediately test any little change I do on code but on back-end this is rare to see: you develop with tons of external dependencies (authentications, VPNs, databases...) so getting your application up and running can be an huge hassle and testing API controllers can be slow and frustrating since I have to continuously juggle multiple development environments, manually regenerate tokens, do guesswork to find which parameters you have to use for your API request, maintain my Postman/Insomnia HTTP calls collection to prevent it from turning into an unusable spaghetti mess... lots of repetitive tasks which kills my focus and makes me struggle in getting into a decent flow.

Automated testing has lot of potential in helping with that but its hard to introduce when you're rewriting a legacy sistem and you're already exceeded your budget.

I wonder if I'll keep doing back-end once I'm done with this project.