Awesome DX (Developer Experience)

A curated list of Developer Experience resources

Table of Contents

Articles

Title Description Author Date Developer experience is the next major competitive front in enterprise tech Now that cloud is old news and APIs launch major businesses, the most successful companies over the next decade of enterprise tech will delight their customers. Tom Krazit 4/13/2021 Why should we care about Developer Experience (DX) Knowledgeable developers are like royalty that’s hard to please. But they’re irreplaceable. Yes, you can substitute employees, but if they’re less skilled, you might end up with costly refactoring. If you value the experienced team you have, consider working on what’s called the developer experience to keep them eager and comfortable. Marek Gajda 3/26/2021 How to build a great developer experience Nowadays, Developer Experience (DX) is essential for software products. Akin to User Experience (UX), DX instead focuses on improving the developer's journey, reducing hang-ups, and encouraging success throughout their programming experience. Nick Lloyd 3/23/2021 How We Measure Developer Experience at Trybe In this post, I show how do we measure Developer Experience at Trybe Elton Minetto 1/17/2021 Developer Experience at Netlify The Developer Experience organization at Netlify is quite unique. In this post, we talk through the structure of the organization, how we work, who we are, and some of our team strategies. Sarah Drasner 1/6/2021 Developer experience: an essential aspect of enterprise architecture Considering the interfaces throughout an enterprise architecture will lead to broader adoption. Read this primer on how to develop a great experience. Bob Reselman 11/18/2020 Why care about the developer experience? By focusing on creating a great developer experience, Stripe created viral growth for a product that does not feel inherently viral, a payment processing system. They did this by recognizing the importance of the developer experience, executing on it, and by marketing to developers. Sean Falconer 11/16/2020 How to reach Developer Experience supreme level Beyond measuring DX, people were struggling to identify the maturity levels of these professionals at their jobs. So I decided to write this article and explain my Developer Experience Maturity thesis. Albert Cavalcante 8/18/2020 Stripe: Building a Developer Cult What makes Stripe a favorite of developers, the advantages of building a cult, and the how the little things add up for developers Jack Gecawich 7/20/2020 What is Developer Experience (DX)? Developer Experience is a term with a self-declaring meaning — the experience of developers — but it eludes definition in the sense that people invoke it at different times for different reasons referring to different things. Chris Coyier 6/15/2020 Developer Experience Metrics In my view the first step to create DX metrics is to already have full mastery over UX metrics, but why? Because DX is a strand within UX, that is developers who use your product, even if extremely technical users, are still users who will be impacted if your product has a bad UX. Albert Cavalcante 5/11/2020 Why Your API Needs a Dedicated Developer Experience Team How can API companies improve their overall process and deliver the high-quality experience their users want? One of the best answers to that question is: Focus on creating a dedicated developer experience team that can empower your users by making it easier to understand, easier to build, and easier to integrate (particularly if your company develops customer-facing APIs). James Messinger 3/11/2020 100 Days of Developer eXperience Most of the 100 Days of Developer eXperience posts are combination of empirical quotes from developers and facts from scientific articles. Jarkko Moilanen 11/6/2019 Why Developer Experience Matters With the rise of API companies and technical products focused on developers, there is increasing focus on their developer experience. Product managers, marketers, and engineers alike have an interest in evaluating and improving how a developer uses their technical product. Adam DuVander 10/1/2019 Tiny Wins I recently shipped two things at GitHub that had an impact beyond my wildest dreams. The amount of gratitude and love that spilled out of the community is like nothing I’ve seen before. But the things I shipped weren’t these huge, meaty projects. They were tiny. Joel Califa 1/30/2018 The Best Practices for a Great Developer Experience (DX) Developer Experience (DX) is the equivalent to User Experience (UX) when the user of the software or system is a developer. DX describes the experience developers have when they use your product, be it client libraries, SDKs, frameworks, open source code, tools, API, technology or service. DX shares some ideas and philosophies from UX design (or HCI), but builds on these with an eye towards modern technology and standards. Sam Jarman 10/6/2017 Building a Developer Experience Team at Sendgrid As we scaled up to hundreds of employees, many new PMs, designers, and engineers ended up working on the product who didn’t share that same explicit understanding of our developer customers. Slowly, but surely, the overall DX around SendGrid suffered. Scott Williamson 4/12/2017 What is API Developer Experience and Why It Matters API developer experience is a relatively novel focus aimed to improve API design so it provides a seamless experience to developers when writing software. It can help increase programmers’ efficience and make it easier for developers to achieve goals on behalf of end users. Sergio De Simone 10/25/2015 APIs for Humans: The Rise of Developer Experience (DX) The art of simplifying complex interactions into meaningful user experiences is an important competitive advantage for technology companies. But what if your product is an API and your end-users are developers? How do you design a good experience for them? Freddy Rangel 9/22/2015 Effective Developer Experience (DX) When Apple introduced the iPhone, the device captured the imaginations of its users. Its features satisfied basic needs and also inspired ideas of what could be done when the Internet was always in your pocket. Eight months later, Apple made the iOS SDK available, transforming the iPhone from a product into a platform. Jeremiah Lee 3/24/2011

Events

Name Location Date DevX Conf Online 4/28/2021

Products

2018 - Current

Name Description Founded Year Bannerbear Bannerbear auto-generates social media visuals, ecommerce banners, and dynamic email images. 2019 Budibase Budibase helps you build internal tools on your own infrastructure in minutes. 2019 Fig Fig adds visual apps, shortcuts, and autocomplete to the terminal. 2020 Linear Linear helps streamline software projects, sprints, tasks, and bug tracking. 2019 Nhost Nhost is a open source Firebase alternative with GraphQL. 2019 PlanetScale PlanetScale is a serverless database platform that you can start in seconds. 2018 Railway Railway helps you develop code in a cloud that feels local. 2020 Raycast Raycast lets you control your tools with a few keystrokes. 2020 Render Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites. 2018 Roboflow Roboflow is a developer tool for building computer vision models faster and more accurately. 2019 Supabase Supabase is the open source Firebase alternative. 2020 Temporal Temporal enables its users to build and operate resilient applications using developer-friendly primitives. 2019 WorkOS WorkOS provides APIs to make applications enterprise-ready. 2018

2014 - 2017

Name Description Founded Year CodeSandbox CodeSandbox is a free, instant, collaborative sandboxes for rapid web development. 2017 CodeStream CodeStream puts team chat directly into most popular IDEs, making it easier for developers to talk about code & write software together. 2017 Gatsby Gatsby is an open source web development tool and framework which is customizable and extensible for any purpose. 2015 GitLab GitLab is a web-based open source Git repository manager with wiki and issue tracking features and built-in CI/CD. 2014 LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform for software teams. 2014 Mux Mux is a video platform designed to make video streaming and analytics possible for every development team. 2015 Netlify Netlify is a unified platform that automates code to create high-performant, easily-maintainable sites, and web-apps. 2014 PopSQL PopSQL is a modern, collaborative SQL editor for teams. 2017 Postman Postman is the collaboration platform for API development. 2014 Prisma Prisma enables its users to access all of their databases in a single GraphQL query. 2016 Readme Readme provides every company the ability to quickly create beautiful documentation, and build loyal, productive developer communities. 2014 Replit Replit is a browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) built for cross-platform collaborative coding. 2016 Retool Retool is a fast way of building internal applications. 2017 Split Split is a feature delivery platform that builds software for engineering teams to build products. 2015 Vercel Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. 2015

2010 - 2013

Name Description Founded Year Algolia Algolia is a search platform that enables companies to deliver fast and relevant digital experiences. 2012 Auth0 Auth0 is an identity management platform for web, mobile, IoT, and internal applications. 2013 DigitalOcean DigitalOcean provides a cloud platform to deploy, manage, and scale applications of any size. 2012 Expo Expo lets developers build universal native apps that work across Android, iOS, and the web by writing them once in just JavaScript. 2013 Firebase Firebase is a mobile platform that develops apps that grow users base on iOS, Android, or the Web. 2011 HashiCorp HashiCorp is a company that solves development, security, and operations challenges in infrastructure. 2012 Nylas Nylas provides an API platform that enables developers to quickly and process user data from any email and calendar. 2013 Plaid Plaid provides companies with the tools and access needed for the development of a digitally-enabled financial system. 2013 Sentry Sentry is a developer of an application monitoring platform that helps developers monitor apps in real time to catch bugs early. 2012 Snowflake Snowflake is a cloud data platform that provides a data warehouse-as-a-service designed for the cloud. 2012 Stripe Stripe is a developer-oriented commerce company helping small and large companies accept web and mobile payments. 2010 Webflow Webflow is a visual web design platform, CMS, and hosting provider for building production websites and prototypes. 2013

2000 - 2009

Name Description Founded Year Cloudflare Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that provides online services to protect and accelerate websites online. 2009 GitHub GitHub provides code hosting services that allow developers to build software for open source and private projects. 2008 Heroku Heroku is a platform as a service that provides services to create, run, and scale web and mobile apps. 2007 Liferay Liferay makes software that helps companies create digital experiences on web, mobile and connected devices. 2004 MongoDB MongoDB is a general purpose, document-based, distributed database built for modern application developers and for the cloud era. 2007 Twilio Twilio is a cloud communication company that enables users to build voice, VoIP, and SMS apps via a web API. 2008

Research

Title Highlights Institution Year of Publication Towards an Empirically-Based IDE: An Analysis of Code Size and Screen Space The average length of functions per programming language: Java (8.87 lines) / C++ (19.48 lines) / Python (15.60) / JavaScript (21.68 lines). The average line width: Java (70.27 chars) / C++ (74.96 chars) / Python (72.75 chars) / JavaScript (66.32 chars). University of Tennessee 2019 Measuring program comprehension: A large-scale field study with professionals In a study with Java and C# projects, they found that most of the time the developer spends is with Navigation and Comprehension. Here's a summary: Comprehension (57.62%) / Navigation (23.96%) / Editing (5.02%) / Others (13.40%). Data sample: 78 developers across 7 projects over 3,148 working hours Singapore Management University 2018 Developer Experience: Concept and Definition Developer experience could be defined as a means for capturing how developers think and feel about their activities within their working environments University of Helsinki 2012

Videos