DX is UX: Key insights for improving developer experience

Many of the world’s top businesses have turned user experience (UX) into a continuous process because they’ve realized users of their app/website are very critical when it comes to their experience.

Today customers show no sign of hesitation to abandon a brand at the slightest irritation: a delayed response, an unexpected behavior, an unresponsive app button, or an unpleasant design.

But developers often resign themselves to the pains and discomfort of their daily codease:

These are all bad experiences. However, they’re all preventable and fixable. Developers, as the users of their codebase, need to make their journey as delightful and frictionless as possible. 

How can developers improve their experience (DX) of the development process? What tools are there to assist them?

These are some of the questions that one of Talon.One’s front-end developers, Mathieu Anderson, addressed in his presentation at JSConf Budapest 2022. Here’s some key takeaways from Mathieu’s talk. You can watch the complete presentation here.

Speed is a key metric for evaluating the quality of DX. Long processes and legacy software delivery lifecycle irritate developers. The following tips and tools help increase the speed of the development process.  

Research shows that high performance teams consistently deliver services faster than their competitors. The core of continuous delivery is that everything that gets merged to the main branch is immediately deployed for all of your users. 

As a result of continuous delivery, developers

Developers enjoy intellectually stimulating conversations with product designers and product managers. However, these conversations need to take place at specific times during the lifecycle of a feature deployment. If tasks are not defined early, they will turn into serious bottlenecks for developers.

If you care about code quality and knowledge sharing, you need to implement a review process. There are automated ways that clearly define who does what. Or, you can simply talk to your colleagues and agree on your code. 

Don’t forget the golden rule of code review: “Respect others and don’t take anything personally! We all make mistakes at some point.”

These tools can help you accelerate the development process and create a better DX:

The following insights help developers create a standard DX that is rarely affected by unexpected bottlenecks:

No developer wants to argue about certain things in a codebase including semicolons and codes. You can use a code formatter like Prettier that supports many languages and integrates with most editors. 

Your next step to make DX a standard experience is code linting. Code linting is different from code formatting as the latter refers to how it looks while the former is concerned with what it does and how. 

JavaScript is an amazing language because you can do anything anywhere you want. JavaScript is also a terrible language because you can do anything anywhere you want. This is particularly painful when you work with dates and numbers. 

Pick a library to standardize your numbers, dates, etc. It doesn’t have to be the best library; it should be the one that works best for you. 

Standard documentation is not limited to written documents; rather, it refers to all measures you can take to ensure that whoever comes to your code can find the information they need. 

These tools can help you standardize your DX and remove ambiguity from the development process:

Broken codes should be detected and fixed as soon as possible. But ideally, codes shouldn’t even break in the first place. How can developers get into this ideal state?

The most popular typed superset of JavaScript is of course TypeScript. However, there are other types (see Useful tools below) that help you catch errors early in your editor.

(Automated) testing can make your app reliable and your DX much better. You can use unit tests for small functions and integration tests for more complex flows.

Testing by humans is as important as automated testing. Developers don’t write codes to pass an automated test. They write codes to provide people with a pleasant app experience and help them achieve results. 

Even if developers implement everything as they should, things may break at some point. It’s inevitable. Implement a monitoring tool, have reporting and prioritize issues to create a smooth DX.

These tools can assist you in minimizing the bottlenecks and maximizing the reliability of your DX:

Developers can find their work taxing at times so they need to have fun too. Nothing can help a developer thrive more than a healthy and friendly work environment. 

In order to make your DX delightful you need to make sure you support your fellow developers and get support from them. The more you feel supported, the less you will feel overwhelmed by your work.

Developers also should pay special attention to sharing their experience with other developers. Sharing knowledge helps developers perform better and become stronger as professionals. 

Talon.Onecan improve the experience of developers by providing them with a tool that saves them months of hard work. To top that off, developers can get dedicated technical support through Docs, SDKs and Technical Engineers that guide them along the way.