Mar 22, 2022
DevX Digest 10 - A look at DevX with Chris Weichel
Pauline Narvas
Mike Nikles
Welcome to DevX Digest - the place to hear all about Developer Experience, brought to you by Pauline Narvas (@paulienuh) and Mike Nikles (@mikenikles) from Gitpod. You’re reading another newsletter from us 🎉! In this edition, we talk about developer experience in cloud-based,ephemeral dev environments.
The recent episode of DevX Pod is a special one! We spoke to our Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Gitpod, Chris about his thoughts on developer experience. We also are very excited to welcome him as a future podcast host! You’ll be hearing more from him. 🎶
As usual, in today’s newsletter, we’ll be sharing some of our key takeaways from the podcast episode. If you’d like to listen to the full episode, head over to your favourite podcast platform and search for DevXPod. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a rating ⭐️ Alternatively, if you’d prefer to read a transcript of our conversation head over to our Buzzsprout site!
DevX Pod is avaliable wherever you get your podcasts!
Key Takeaways
Before joining Gitpod as employee #2, Chris worked at an IT startup that came out of Bosch as a System Architect for a couple of year. He also did a PhD on Human Computer Interaction. Today, he’s Gitpod’s CTO.
Chris described developer experience as user experience, but for developers. Similar to how we use a pen when writing but don’t really think about it, we want every developer experience to be the same. I.e. it just fades to the background!
Developer experience is more than just the end product experience however. It’s not just the documentation that surrounds it either! DevX should be seen from the lens of the ecosystem. As Chris shared on the podcast, “It is the way it is applied. It is the way you, as a developer can influence the tools that you are using. And this is really puts us in a very unique perspective.”
The reality is developers are expected to do a lot these days. It’s not “just” coding! Good developer experience is important more than ever to help reduce individual developer burnout and maximise productivity. For example: instead of doing the same thing over, let’s automate it, remove the friction and using working in factors to illustrate this: reducing repetitive strain injury. From a company perspective, DevX is becoming more relevant as well especially from a hiring point of view. Have you got a developer experience that is “bad”? Some engineers actively avoid using specific tools and technologies because of it!
Looking ahead, Chris compared DevX to CI/CD. In a similar fashion, in a few years if you aren’t doing CI/CD in your organisation (or doing it well), you don’t have good DevX.
“If you’re building a product that is aimed at developers. Or even remotely touches on developers! You’ll need to provide good developer experience for that too, because otherwise it will be a hurdle for people to adopt your product.”
DevX Digest is community-driven
Another thing about Gitpodders is that we’re all driven by community feedback, and this newsletter is no exception! Please send us your thoughts, feedback and help us navigate this conversation. We may even feature some of your takes and comments in future newsletters!
Come and hang out with us over on our Discord. 👋🏼
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