Ahmad Awais

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Developer Experience (DX) in one word?

Ahmad AwaisAhmad Awais

Developer Experience (DX) is the experience of using a developer tool or extending your product (meant for developers), API, open-source code, or just about anything that has to do with developers. It’s the equivalent of User Experience when the primary user of the product is a developer.

As a consultant who helps businesses understand developers, this term DX is thrown around a lot and probably heavily discussed. It’s fun to see how the definition changes based on the context of a project/company or thoughts of the company’s CTO.

Developer Experience…#

What’s the first thing you think of when you think of “Developer Experience” (DX)?” β€” asked Chris Coyier on Twitter today.

And here’s what I shared…

In two words: “Less Friction

…ok the last one there might be too close to my heart but all things considered, having a good DX can mean a lot of things to your company.

Developer Experience has a cost to it. Some companies, in an effort to improve DX around their products, sacrifice the User Experience (UX) whereas I believe there should be a good equilibrium between DX & UX. It’s what some people call the Trickledown Experience. A story for another day.

If you are on Craigslist looking to buy a bed. And you find a listing of a bed that’s free. You immediately think that there’s something seriously wrong with it. Bed bugs or part of a crime scene.

At the same time if you find a listing of a bed that’s USD 5000. Your mind goes, “oh boy; this bed must be amazing, how lucky are the people who get to sleep on it”. And you wonder…

DX works in a similar fashion. Just because you open-sourced an SDK doesn’t mean developers are going to fall heads over heels in love with your product. It’s an art. For that, you need help from a practicing artisan. Who knows what developers care about. Invest in that.

Founder & CEO at Langbase.com Β· Ex VP DevRel Rapid Β· Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor ❯ AI/ML Advisory Board member San Francisco, DevNetwork

🎩 Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 🦊 Google Developers Expert Web DevRel πŸš€ NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor πŸ† 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 3x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).

🌳 Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. πŸ“Ÿ Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation (100 videos Β· 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 142 Million views, 22 yrs Blogging, 56K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.

✌️ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide ⓦ WordPress Core Developer πŸ“£ TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.

✨ As quoted by: Satya Nadella Β· CEO of Microsoft β€” Awais is an awesome example for developers.
πŸ™Œ Leading developers and publishing technical content for over a decade πŸ’œ Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

πŸ‘‹β€¦ Awais is mostly active on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais

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