Gitpod DevXConf ‘developer experience’: never mind UX, what about DevX?

Open source developer platform company Gitpod is sprouting new growth. 

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The company’s software is positioned as a software engineering platform to automate the provisioning of ready-to-code development environments.

Alongside some financial updates, the GitPod has detailed what it calls a veritable ‘bevy’ of product features and the first-ever DevX Conf purely focused on improving the developer experience.

About time too eh?

Well, to be fair, we do hear a whole lot about so-called User eXperience (UX) with its fancy lower-case upper-case nametag and acronym, so very arguably, we should be thinking about DevX first… otherwise, none of that UX will ever get delivered properly, if at all… right?

Gitpod uses version control system as the canonical source of truth to automate what a developer needs to start coding. Its technology claims to free engineering teams from the friction of manually setting-up local dev environments.

As we know, developers are pursuing automation everywhere they can, yet they are arguably wasting energy manually setting up and maintaining development environments. 

Well, it works-on-my-machine

The Gitpod team point out that millions of developers are slowed down on a daily basis with tedious tasks, facing unnecessary ‘works-on-my-machine’ problems. Developers are increasingly choosing cloud-based development environments as a result of local machine limits, security policies and complexities of a remote world.

“Gitpod is obsessed with bringing back joy and speed to the modern developer experience,” said Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst. “Devs today are struggling with larger codebases and more complex dependencies, leading to cluttered environments that hamper productivity and collaboration. Gitpod removes that friction and is on track to establish an essential new product category in modern software development.”  

In line with the virtual conference news, Gitpod has detailed three new product features:

• With VS Code in Gitpod, developers get the most popular editing experience combined with all the benefits of a fully automated, cloud-based solution.
• With sudo privileges and Docker support, developers can build Docker images to run containers within their workspace. This is based on advanced namespace layering technology.
• Finally, the entire dashboard has been redesigned to speed-up developers’ workflows.

The developer experience gap is an increasingly documented concern as recently detailed in a post by Stephen O’Grady from RedMonk. 

“While developers have a wealth of tools at their fingertips, integrating them all together and operating that patchwork quilt of technologies is a major gap in the developer experience. One important tool in addressing the problem is automation, which can lower the burden on developers to maintain these complicated pipelines,” said O’Grady. “Gitpod’s embrace of automated, higher quality developer experiences, therefore, is one to watch.”

We care a lot (about daily experience)

DevXConf, organised by the Gitpod team, claims to be the first-ever community event ‘exclusively about developer experience’ – the daily experience of developers when trying to get their job done – and the event itself is live linked in text above.

“We write code within specific languages/frameworks, use tools, glue them together to (tool) chains, develop against APIs and communicate and collaborate with other developers. All of that should be efficient, sustainable and joyful.” said Sven Efftinge, CEO, Gitpod. “At DevXConf some of the brightest minds from the community get together and have a conversation on how we can make software engineering more productive and fun.”

Gitpod is available for everyone writing code and provides a free SaaS offering.