Why Developer Experience Matters

Show Notes

The developer experience industry is in the billions at this point
This was mostly lead by companies like Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, etc. creating ways for developers to deploy their code and not have to worry about things like CI/CD, scaling, backups, monitoring, and even databases now
Developer experience is the ease or difficulty in allowing you as a developer to focus on the code rather then the external stuff like code editors, build processes,
What is the thing in the development process that pisses you off the most?

Story time
- In a previous contract I had to build android apps
- To do this everytime I had to change code I needed to rebuild the application and then have it deployed on a device and restart and open it
- Each time this process could take 5-10min just to test out any change
- Simple feature would take hours to build sometimes due to small little changes I had to do and wait to test
Web development opened up a new avenue for me where I could write code and see it almost instantaneously appear int eh browser, making iteration a lot faster. Features became easy to iterate on and build.
Removing friction from the development process made me a better developer
Do you remember a time when you used a new tool that increased your developer experience?

You shouldn’t be focused more on starting your dev servers, building/compiling your code, deploying it and managing it then you are writing your code
Plenty of new tools you can use
- Monorepos (pnpm, turbo repo, etc.)
- DB orms (prisma, drizzle)
- Platforms as a service
  - DB - PlanetScale and neon
  - hosting - Vercel and Netlify
  - self hosting - Coolify
- Vite is much faster then webpack for dev server and bundling
Take it into your own hands
- Find what annoys you and try to solve it
- Story time
  - We had issues with deployment environments for qa/staging
  - Each environment took 20-30min to create because of all the services it needed to spin up and shared env variables used
  - I wrote a script that did it in a couple minutes with a bunch of prompts for different use cases
  - QA became smoother
  - Developers can focus more on writing code vs non productive stuff
- AI is great at writing scripts with the right prompts so any areas where you see some repetitive tasks can be automated really quickly with scripts
Do you have a time when you said F*** it and made or did something to make your developer experience better?

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