The Case for ‘Developer Experience’

A good essay from Jean Yang.

What I mean by developer experience is the sum total of how developers interface with their tools, end-to-end, day-in and day-out. Sure, there’s more focus than ever on how developers use and adopt tools, and there are entire talks and panels devoted to the topic of so-called “DX” — yet large parts of developer experience are still largely ignored. With developers spending less than a third of their time actually writing code, developer experience includes all the other stuff: maintaining code, testing, security issues, addressing incidents, and more. And many of these aspects of developer experience continue getting ignored because they’re complex, they’re messy, and they don’t have “silver bullet” solutions.

She makes the case that DX has perhaps been generally oversimplified and there are categories of tools that have very different DX:

My major revelation was that there are actually two categories of tools — and therefore, two different categories of developer experience needs: abstraction tools (which assume we code in a vacuum) and complexity-exploring tools (which assume we work in complex environments). Most developer experience until now has been solely focused on the former category of abstraction, where there are more straightforward ways to understand good developer experience than the former. 

Reminds me of how Shawn thinks:

It’s time we look beyond the easy questions in developer experience and start addressing the uncomfortable ones.

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