Overview
One evening you’re browsing Twitter and you stumble on a really cool new Open Source tool. The README is intuitive, the installation is seamless and you’re up and running in no time. When using the tool, error messages are clear and how to fix the issues obvious. Before you know it, you’ve achieved what you wanted and you feel like a superstar! But the experience is very different the next day at work. You just spent a couple weeks fiddling to get a project running locally but now you have to jump through hoops to get the application built and deployed with that dreadful internal tool. Why can’t our day time experiences look like our weekend passion projects? It can!
In this session you’ll be introduced to the concept of Developer Experience and why it matters. You’ll then embark on a journey to build a new tool with Developer Experience as a core focus. You’ll learn how certain targeted approaches can improve the Developer Experience through the entire Experience Lifecycle. At the end of the talk you will be equipped with ways to improve the Developer Experience in your work; whether you’re building tools for developers, collaborating with other developers on a business project, or just building a side project one your own.
Target Audience
Any developer working with other developers.
Assumed Audience Knowledge
Some knowledge of Git.
Level
Beginner
Five Things Audience Members Will Learn
- The importance of empathy when embarking on this journey
- Covers the concept of Developer Experience and why it matters
- Go over some practices to improve the Developer Experience of whatever you have now (README tips, targeted automation, identifying low hanging fruit, convention over configuration, etc).
- Practical examples of improving developer experience like Levenshtein distance for spell checking, up front validations, moving feedback to the left, linting rules, etc
- Importance of backwards compatibility, Semver, and working within an existing ecosystem
