📖The Case for 'Developer Experience'

url
https://future.a16z.com/the-case-for-developer-experience/

  • “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