A few weeks ago, I Tweeted about how there are really two different kinds of developer tools, ones that abstract over functionality and ones that reve

Developer Experience: Stuck Between Abstraction and a Hard Place?

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2021-06-29 11:30:03

A few weeks ago, I Tweeted about how there are really two different kinds of developer tools, ones that abstract over functionality and ones that reveal complexity:

The story behind the thread is this. Even though I’ve been working on developer tools for over a decade, it was only last year that I had two major revelations about developer experience. First, there are really two kinds of developer tools: abstraction tools and complexity-revealing tools. Second, it’s crucial to think about developer experience differently for these two categories.

This blog post is an elaboration of both revelations as it’s relevant for mainstream developers building web applications. I believe it’s important not just for developer tool creators to think about this distinction, but users of dev tools. After all, it’s the users who determine relative popularity, and thus which tools live and die! ⚔️

I’ve been told I need to slow down my writing for the effect of high quality, so let me first take you on a leisurely tour of my life.

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