There is an excellent tool called entr that can be used to run commands on file change. I always forget what it’s called, so I’ve put this tip here. (N.b.: it stands for Event Notify Test Runner.)

It can be used to automatically re-compile (and even restart servers) while you are editing the source files. A simple example is

git ls-files | entr make

Which works well for repos which only track source files. And depending on what is in your makefile, it can for example build and flash the embedded program onto the embedded target. (I tend to use CMake for projects, with a simple makefile to avoid setting long makeprg/makecmd, so I can just do :make<ret>.)