TAQELAH Lightning Talks 2020

Building an
Awesome Developer
Experience (DX)
Unmesh Gundecha
Senior Architect, DevOps, DX and
Testing

https://about.me/upgundecha
Agenda
• What is Developer Experience (DX)?
• Elements & benefits of a great Developer Experience
• Examples
• Phase of DX
• Developer Onboarding
• Application Onboarding
• Measuring DX
 What is Developer Experience?

Developer Experience is the equivalent of User Experience when the

primary user of the product is a developer. DX cares about the developer
experience of using a product, its libs, SDKs, documentation, frameworks,
open-source solutions, general tools, APIs, etc.

Source - What Is DX? (Developer Experience), Albert Cavalcante, https://link.medium.com/nZ7H1gEyw9

Benefits of DX
• Save your team’s resources to focus what’s business
really needs
• Accelerate innovation and time-to-market
• Gain onboarding agility and integration with fewer
efforts
• Increase developer satisfaction ☺
Elements of DX
• Developer workstations
• Code editor, Integrated Development Environment
(IDE)
• Documentation, wiki’s
• SDKs (Software Development Kit)
• APIs - developer portals
• CLIs (Command line applications)
• Design tools
• Work management tools
• Monitoring tools

Platforms
Payment processing
Cloud Provider
software
• Best in class developer • First choice for cloud
portal • Continuous Innovation
• Cross platform SDK’s • Built for different
• Extensive documentation developer personas –
and code examples Console, API, SDKs
• High availability • Clean documentation,
• Test environment & test sample code and
data example projects
• Easy to onboard • Training and certifications
• Free credits!
• Highly available
• Easy to onboard
Examples
Tools
Test automation tool for
Cross platform IDE API development tool
modern web applications
• Cross platform IDE • Swiss army knife of API • Getting popular with
• Built on open source and development frontend developers
JavaScript • Clean UI • Native support for Node,
• First choice among web • Supports debugging, JS
developers testing and monitoring • Great debugging support
• Plugins/Extensions APIs • Neat documentation,
• Extensibility • User community examples and getting
• User community • Easy to onboard started guides
• Easy to onboard • Neat API
• Engaged user community
• Extensibility
• Easy to onboard
Phases
• Developer Onboarding
 Did you have same “WOW” experience with development tools to
get you started at your workplace?

Fragmented tools

Multiple configurations

Mul0ple creden0als

Hard to install

Hard to update
 How to build a great onboarding experience?

• Give developers a starting point - learning paths, knowledge trails

• Use personas to create collection of tools, configurations, access
rights and scripts to automatically deploy tools & settings on
developer workstations (tools – Homebrew, Chocolatey, Terraform, Chief,
Ansible…)
• Enable single sign on (SSO) for online tools and self service from
day one!
Application Onboarding
 New ways of working, Agile, DevOps

You build it, you run it!

Source - A Conversation with Werner Vogels, https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1142065

Application/developer Journey

Idea

Retire Plan

Depreciate Setup

Maintain Design

Operate Code

Monitor Build

Deploy Test
 How to build a great onboarding experience?

• Build template repositories, build pipelines, & deploy

infrastructure as code, tests (tools - GitHub templates, GitHub Actions,
Jenkins Pipelines, Terraform, Ansible, CDKs…)
• Build online initializers to generate new application definition,
code repositories, build and deployment pipelines using the
templates (tools -- Backstage, Spring Initializer…)
• Enable monitoring and observability by default
• Use modern documentation tools (tools - Markdown, Docusaurus)
• Keep everything in single view and self serviceable
Meet, Spotify Backstage

https://github.com/spotify/backstage
 Golden Paths

Source - https://backstage.io/blog/2020/03/18/what-is-backstage
60 seconds demo of Backstage

Source - https://backstage.io/blog/2020/03/18/what-is-backstage
 Service View

Source - https://github.com/spotify/backstage/issues/2071
 Measuring DX
UX Pillars DX Pillars

• Usability • [DX] Function = [UX] Accessibility

• Accessibility • [DX] Stability (Uptime) = [UX]
Credibility
• Findability
• [DX] Ease of use = [DX] Usability
• Credibility
• [DX] Clarity = [UX] Findability

Source - https://medium.com/@albertcavalcante/developer-experience-metrics-46b1d087811d
Let’s make developers happy!

Thank you!

Q&A in #It-unmesh