Developer Experience

It all starts with smaller stories

I think most developers have experienced a taks sitting in progress for days or even weeks (or… months!) on end. This long running work eventually gets merged and released but it turns out it’s the wrong thing and a large part needs rework.

The solution to this struggle is two-fold. The first half is getting invested in your customers. Talk to them, establish a good relation with the people that actually use the product you are building. Find out what they really need. This practice is known as User Centered Design and while I find it very interesting, it’s not the topic of this post. We’re looking at the other half, breaking down work into smaller pieces and the result of doing so.

My first podcast appearance

On the 9th of August 2022 Robert Kloosterhuis and myself recorded a podcast episode with the nice folks at CodeCapi. They invited us over to talk about developer experience. A pretty broad topic and we covered a lot of stuff in the recording.

This was my first experience with recording something so I was a bit nervous but in the end it was a great experience and I’m very happy with the episode that came from it.

Paved road - Templates

In my previous post about paving the road to production there were some ideas around offering deployment pipelines as a service in your organization. In this post, we’re going to take it up a level and have a look what we can do to remove even more friction, specifically when creating a new app from scratch.

The process of creating a new app generally looks something like this:

• Pick runtime and language
• Pick any suitable frameworks
• Add any additional dependencies for stuff like databases, single sign on, logging, etc.
• Integrate all the above
• Make sure it all works locally
• Set up configs for various environments
• Set up a pipeline
• Deploy to dev/test or other environment to get pipeline working
• Create value for your users ✨

Before you go ahead and start building something generic that you can quickly duplicate for new apps, you should think about what you are willing to support and what level of customization is going to make the most sense.

Paved road - Deployments

Speeding up developer teams by eliminating waste and busywork can come in many forms. A huge step comes through automation, deployment specifically. Getting your app to production in an automated manner through some sort of pipeline is a huge timesaver.

Given this automation, you can take it one step further by moving the creation and management of those pipelines one step up and offer ready made pipelines that teams can take from the digital shelf. These pipelines can be managed by the internal developer community or maybe a supporting team that already enables teams in other ways.