21–30 of 38 posts
> Developer experience focuses on the lived experience of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work. I know this is captious of me, but I never understood this phrase "lived experience". As opposed to..? Is there another kind of experience?
> Developer experience focuses on the lived experience of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work. I know this is captious of me, but I never understood this phrase "lived experience". As opposed to..? Is there another kind of experience?
Lived experience is when you encounter something and you live through that experience.
Learned experience is when you read about an encounter someone else lived through and they explain condensed points of emphasis.
The social media plugin and reporting system for the SaaS I'm working on is an idiotic, over-engineered monstrosity. But, after trial and error, I've mastered it from a what-goes-where-standpoint.
If I were to document the entire thing from my vantage point, it'd take me a week, and even if I did it, it'd take another dev about a week just to wrap their head around it to implement a new feature AFTER reading what I wrote. Or, I could do it between standup and lunch provided I had no distractions.
I posted this comment in response to the previous submission [1] of this same "paper": Also note that the prior work they repeatedly cite (no less than 5 times in as many paragraphs, and indirectly referenced several times in relation to the 20+ "sociotechnical factors"), i.e. reference number (9), is based on "semi-structured interviews with 21 developers". While a lot of the observations and recommendations are cor…
Maybe it is atonement of some sort.
I'm very suspicious of survey grounded research. p-values in the social sciences are high for a reason.
lol @ ebay and DevEx. (one of the examples in the article) When I was there (up to 2017) the team that made the internal web framework, Raptor, refused to let anyone see the source code. I mean people that worked at the company, they wouldn't let people sitting 15 feet from them see the source code to the web framework that they used all day to work. Of course you could easily see it in any Java IDE, but they didn't…
Not being able to get color scheme misalignment fixed with multiple team-years’ of effort is shocking and appalling.
> Developer experience focuses on the lived experience of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work. I know this is captious of me, but I never understood this phrase "lived experience". As opposed to..? Is there another kind of experience?
I can tldr this as "give devs better tools and get out of the way", but boy, this 'paper' is a tedious read. If they would dump all the pretentious language and just say "hey, we asked some devs what they would like and here's the gist of what they said", then shorten this blog post 10x, it would be better. Sometimes you wish authors would use GPT-4.
lol @ ebay and DevEx. (one of the examples in the article) When I was there (up to 2017) the team that made the internal web framework, Raptor, refused to let anyone see the source code. I mean people that worked at the company, they wouldn't let people sitting 15 feet from them see the source code to the web framework that they used all day to work. Of course you could easily see it in any Java IDE, but they didn't…
> They can't even get the color scheme aligned. Again, if they said 'nobody cares' that's just prioritization, but I know that this has been attempted at least 5 times with teams of a dozen people spending up to a year on it. Not being able to get color scheme misalignment fixed with multiple team-years’ of effort is shocking and appalling.
Most human organisations are crippled by pathologies mistrust and misaligned incentives.
Fixing those almost always involves ending the org and building a new one.
The article begins with: Engineering leaders have long sought to improve the productivity of their developers ... A goal every organization can support, no doubt. What the rest of the article fails to discuss is how upstream-processes determine developer productivity far more than the three dimensions identified. To wit, the clarity and focus of "what and why" for an effort determines the "how and when." Which makes…
> Developer experience focuses on the lived experience of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work. I know this is captious of me, but I never understood this phrase "lived experience". As opposed to..? Is there another kind of experience?
I as an outsider may observe friction in a developer--customer meeting. Ask the developer, and they may reveal that they found the arguments during the meeting highly valuable and productive. A lot of case studies and experiments in productivity improvement are observational. You do something and then you look at the results, rather than how the lives of the people involved changed.
When an outsider looks at a situation, they often see something very different to what the people in it did. That's the difference between lived ("insider") and observed ("outsider").
(Of course, strictly speaking, you don't get lived experience from interviewing people. People being interviewed tell you, to some extent, what they think you want to hear at that time. To really get closer to lived experience the researcher has to embed with the group being studied and work with them for some time.)