📖The Case for 'Developer Experience' | Future

“Developers work in messy, complex environments”

Developers do much more than just reading and writing code. But most of other activities are ignored because they are messy and complex, and don’t have “silver bullet” solutions.

We concentrate on how to make it easier to write new code in a vacuum, yet most developers work with existing code

There are two types of tools:

• abstraction tools assume we code in a vacuum

• complexity-exploring tools assume we work in complex environments

Developers work in rainforests, not planned gardens. Existing software systems are too big to be planned gardens—they are messy and complex, with multiple components interacting. They are organically evolving systems.

• software is heterogenous—it always involves multiple languages and runtimes

the rise of APIs has led to more testing in production

• software development lifecycle (SDLC) is no longer linear and organized

• monitoring / observability

  • observability is about building models of your software, so you can build software more quickly

1. Focus on the problem being solved

2. Focus on fitting into existing workflows

3. Focus on packaging and prioritization