I'm fairly new in our team and yesterday I was going to work on an app I hadn't contributed to yet.

...except I couldn't get it to run on my machine. None of my co-workers knew why and I've spent the entire day trying to solve the problem.

Ultimately I found it. There was a stray package-lock.json that screwed up npm.

It's not your fault. Things like this are responsibility of the team creating the application. There should only be one command to setup a dev environment, at best a 'docker-compose up'. Yet many companies developers stop caring once they can develop on their machine. Which is poison when on boarding a new person.

The worst time I had in getting some project to run on my machine was THREE DAYS! I ranted about that in my team and was then was given time to setup a proper docker stack. That took another day and now the project is ready to develop within 20 minutes on a new machine.

@k0pernikus Woah dude, three days? That's a lot.

Sadly we don't use Docker, so this is bound to repeat for the next hire.

@Frits It doesn't need to be docker. There should at least be a definitive and complete step by step guide showcasing how to get the dev environment running in the project's Readme.md. If there isn't, take it upon yourself to create such a documentation.