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Developer experience is user experience

mikebrevoort.com

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Re: Developer experience is user experience

#11

Post by lexapro »

melvinroest wrote: post #6

Interesting, a previous company I worked at (Triply) highly focused on DX as well. But their characterisation of DX meant that the employees of that company were having an amazing developer experience. What did that look like? * Dell XPS with Linux, you also know that everyone else has a Dell XPS and Linux * An onboarding document to set everything up and it just worked * Strong focus on using a good IDE/text editor…

If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with, it can't be a good DX. Unless their choice is what you'd have chosen anyway.

Re: Developer experience is user experience

#12

Post by omegalulw »

lexapro wrote: post #11
melvinroest wrote: post #6

Interesting, a previous company I worked at (Triply) highly focused on DX as well. But their characterisation of DX meant that the employees of that company were having an amazing developer experience. What did that look like? * Dell XPS with Linux, you also know that everyone else has a Dell XPS and Linux * An onboarding document to set everything up and it just worked * Strong focus on using a good IDE/text editor…

If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with, it can't be a good DX. Unless their choice is what you'd have chosen anyway.

> If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with

I mean not really. Linux is usually an excellent choice for development and if the rest of the company can use it there's probably no reason you can't other than maybe aesthetic ones. IMO they shouldn't take priority over creating a standard dev environment (you still need all OSes for testing, etc but that's a different point).

Re: Developer experience is user experience

#13

Post by bern4444 »

imbnwa wrote: post #2

I think the embedded tweets by Malte Ube basically clears up this whole thing, author appears to be confusing roles with outcomes, like, yes, developers could be your users... and? Am I missing something more? There's still a difference between the developers who develop your product and the developers that use it (dogfooding applies to a small segment of products, not enough to jsutify the generality of this post ti…

Until of course there's an ask to turn that simple website into a complex one that supports multiple flows, handle various user interactions, and begin pulling data from various sources.

A lot of the reason I think people reach for React is because they know there's a high chance of an ask to incorporate more and more capabilities.

Re: Developer experience is user experience

#14

Post by juangacovas »

lexapro wrote: post #11
melvinroest wrote: post #6

Interesting, a previous company I worked at (Triply) highly focused on DX as well. But their characterisation of DX meant that the employees of that company were having an amazing developer experience. What did that look like? * Dell XPS with Linux, you also know that everyone else has a Dell XPS and Linux * An onboarding document to set everything up and it just worked * Strong focus on using a good IDE/text editor…

If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with, it can't be a good DX. Unless their choice is what you'd have chosen anyway.

Yeah, I care about the code that comes into the repository: charset, tab/spaces, style, etc. Who cares about the OS or IDE the developer used to commit or type? Unless you see a productivity/code issues problem...

Re: Developer experience is user experience

#16

Post by pseudalopex »

omegalulw wrote: post #12
lexapro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with, it can't be a good DX. Unless their choice is what you'd have chosen anyway.

> If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with I mean not really. Linux is usually an excellent choice for development and if the rest of the company can use it there's probably no reason you can't other than maybe aesthetic ones. IMO they shouldn't take priority over creating a standard dev environment (you still need all OSes for testing, etc but that's a different point).

The question wasn't if they can use it. The question was if it's a good experience for them.

Re: Developer experience is user experience

#17

Post by didntknowya »

lexapro wrote: post #11
melvinroest wrote: post #6

Interesting, a previous company I worked at (Triply) highly focused on DX as well. But their characterisation of DX meant that the employees of that company were having an amazing developer experience. What did that look like? * Dell XPS with Linux, you also know that everyone else has a Dell XPS and Linux * An onboarding document to set everything up and it just worked * Strong focus on using a good IDE/text editor…

If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with, it can't be a good DX. Unless their choice is what you'd have chosen anyway.

i'd say a standardized OS and environment for onboarding is a better experience for onboarding so everyone is on the same page. doesn't mean you can't change it to something you prefer though.

Re: Developer experience is user experience

#18

Post by theamk »

juangacovas wrote: post #14
lexapro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with, it can't be a good DX. Unless their choice is what you'd have chosen anyway.

Yeah, I care about the code that comes into the repository: charset, tab/spaces, style, etc. Who cares about the OS or IDE the developer used to commit or type? Unless you see a productivity/code issues problem...

There is a productivity problem with supporting multiple OSes: either one OS is unsupported (and people who use it waste their time configuring it), or all the tooling, internal documentation and tutorials has to support both - in which case it is often almost double the work.

I have personally seen team members waste days of their time because they tried to adopt an internal script to MacOS, instead of just using Linux VM as recommended.

Re: Developer experience is user experience

#19

Post by davelovemartin »

DX is the experience of the people who build the product. If the users happen to be developers, it’s still UX.

I get why there is a debate: DX and UX can come into conflict if technology choices don’t serve user needs.

You can optimise your users’ experience by first understanding their needs and then exploring how technology can meet them.

Most of the time, there is no conflict but sometimes tech choices eg buying off-the-shelf software or using a package that isn’t accessible can fail to meet user needs.

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