Years ago, I was introduced to a concept called developer ergonomics. Despite the name, it's not about good chairs, standing desks, or multip

Gratification by Mark Seemann

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2024-05-16 08:30:17

Years ago, I was introduced to a concept called developer ergonomics. Despite the name, it's not about good chairs, standing desks, or multiple monitors. Rather, the concept was related to how easy it'd be for a developer to achieve a certain outcome. How easy is it to set up a new code base in a particular language? How much work is required to save a row in a database? How hard is it to read rows from a database and display the data on a web page? And so on.

These days, we tend to discuss developer experience rather than ergonomics, and that's probably a good thing. This term more immediately conveys what it's about.

I've recently had some discussions about developer experience (DevEx, DX) with one of my customers, and this has lead me to reflect more explicitly on this topic than previously. Most of what I'm going to write here are opinions and beliefs that go back a long time, but apparently, it's only recently that these notions have congealed in my mind under the category name developer experience.

This article may look like your usual old-man-yells-at-cloud article, but I hope that I can avoid that. It's not the case that I yearn for some lost past where 'we' wrote Plankalkül in Edlin. That, in fact, sounds like a horrible developer experience.

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