{"id":7080,"date":"2020-05-17T04:39:20","date_gmt":"2020-05-16T23:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahmadawais.com\/?p=7080"},"modified":"2020-06-29T18:12:13","modified_gmt":"2020-06-29T13:12:13","slug":"developer-experience-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahmadawais.com\/developer-experience-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"Developer Experience (DX) in one word?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s the equivalent of User Experience when the primary user of the product is a developer.<\/p>\n<p>As a consultant who helps businesses understand developers, this term DX is thrown around a lot and probably heavily discussed. It&#8217;s fun to see how the definition changes based on the context of a project\/company or thoughts of the company&#8217;s CTO.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"developer-experience\">Developer Experience\u2026<a href=\"#developer-experience\" class=\"heading-link\">#<\/a><\/h2>\n<p>&#8220;<strong>What&#8217;s the first thing you think of when you think of &#8220;Developer Experience&#8221; (DX)?<\/strong>&#8221; \u2014 asked Chris Coyier on Twitter today.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">What&#39;s the first thing you think of when you think of &quot;Developer Experience&quot; (DX)?<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/chriscoyier\/status\/1261769454645587973?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 16, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">And here&#8217;s what I shared\u2026<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">In two words: &quot;Less Friction&quot;<\/p>\n<p>More context:<\/p>\n<p>\u2705 Less clicking<br \/>\u2705 More automation<br \/>\u2705 Zero or less configuration<br \/>\u2705 Great documentation (searchable)<br \/>\u2705 Dark mode. VSCode support. Next.js<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Ahmad Awais (@MrAhmadAwais) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MrAhmadAwais\/status\/1261798830376472577?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 16, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>In two words: &#8220;<strong>Less Friction<\/strong>&#8221;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u2705 Less clicking<\/li>\n<li>\u2705 More automation<\/li>\n<li>\u2705 Zero or less configuration<\/li>\n<li>\u2705 Great documentation (searchable)<\/li>\n<li>\u2705 Dark mode. VSCode support. Next.js<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u2026ok 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Developer Experience has a cost to it.<\/strong> 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 &amp; UX. It&#8217;s what some people call the Trickledown Experience. <em>A story for another day.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"quote-content\">\n<p>If you are on Craigslist looking to buy a bed. And you find a listing of a bed that&#8217;s free. You immediately think that there&#8217;s something seriously wrong with it. Bed bugs or part of a crime scene.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time if you find a listing of a bed that&#8217;s USD 5000. Your mind goes, &#8220;oh boy; this bed must be amazing, how lucky are the people who get to sleep on it&#8221;. And you wonder\u2026<\/p>\n<p>DX works in a similar fashion. Just because you open-sourced an SDK doesn&#8217;t mean developers are going to fall heads over heels in love with your product. It&#8217;s an art. For that, you need help from a practicing artisan. Who knows what developers care about. Invest in that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s the equivalent of User Experience when the primary user of the product is a developer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"webmentions_disabled_pings":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[220,267,132,268],"class_list":["post-7080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","tag-developer-experience","tag-dx","tag-user-experience","tag-ux"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Developer Experience (DX) in one word?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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. 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Founded Langbase.com, AI cloud to build, deploy, and scale AI agents with tools & memory \u00b7 Creator of Command.new. \"Awais is an awesome example for developers\" \u2014 Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 5x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer). Google Developers Expert Web DevRel. Ex VP Eng (DevTools & DevRel) Rapid \u00b7 Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member \u00b7 AI\/ML\/DevTools Angel Investor (Replit, Resend, Daytona, Gumroad and you?) \u276f AI\/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork. Award-winning Open Source Engineering leader authored hundreds of open-source dev-tools and software libraries used by millions of developers, including Shades of Purple code theme and corona-cli. Linux Foundation (Node.js Committee Lead), OpenAPI Business Governing Board. 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