Awesome DX (Developer Experience)
A curated list of Developer Experience resources
Table of Contents
Articles
| Title | Description | Author | Date | Target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The two types of quality | The Japanese define quality in two ways. Understanding the difference between them is the key to building products that users love. | Zeno Rocha | 8/4/2022 | Developer Products |
| How a frictionless Developer Experience improves software development | Find out what is the Developer Experience, why it is important, and how to make it as frictionless as possible in order to improve the delivered software. | Paolo Martinoli | 5/23/2022 | Employers |
| Developer experience is the next major competitive front in enterprise tech | Now that cloud is old news and APIs launch major businesses, the most successful companies over the next decade of enterprise tech will delight their customers. | Tom Krazit | 4/13/2021 | API Vendors |
| DX & Software Maintainability in Frontend Engineering | Tech Debts, Software Maintainability, Developer Experience, and Technical Leadership in Frontend Engineering | TK | 4/4/2021 | Employers |
| Why should we care about Developer Experience (DX) | Knowledgeable developers are like royalty that’s hard to please. But they’re irreplaceable. Yes, you can substitute employees, but if they’re less skilled, you might end up with costly refactoring. If you value the experienced team you have, consider working on what’s called the developer experience to keep them eager and comfortable. | Marek Gajda | 3/26/2021 | Employers |
| How to build a great developer experience | Nowadays, Developer Experience (DX) is essential for software products. Akin to User Experience (UX), DX instead focuses on improving the developer's journey, reducing hang-ups, and encouraging success throughout their programming experience. | Nick Lloyd | 3/23/2021 | API Producers |
| How We Measure Developer Experience at Trybe | In this post, I show how do we measure Developer Experience at Trybe | Elton Minetto | 1/17/2021 | Employers |
| Developer Experience at Netlify | The Developer Experience organization at Netlify is quite unique. In this post, we talk through the structure of the organization, how we work, who we are, and some of our team strategies. | Sarah Drasner | 1/6/2021 | API Producers |
| Developer experience: an essential aspect of enterprise architecture | Considering the interfaces throughout an enterprise architecture will lead to broader adoption. Read this primer on how to develop a great experience. | Bob Reselman | 11/18/2020 | API Producers (OSS Library Authors) |
| Why care about the developer experience? | By focusing on creating a great developer experience, Stripe created viral growth for a product that does not feel inherently viral, a payment processing system. They did this by recognizing the importance of the developer experience, executing on it, and by marketing to developers. | Sean Falconer | 11/16/2020 | API Producers (SaaS) |
| How to reach Developer Experience supreme level | Beyond measuring DX, people were struggling to identify the maturity levels of these professionals at their jobs. So I decided to write this article and explain my Developer Experience Maturity thesis. | Albert Cavalcante | 8/18/2020 | General/API Producers |
| Stripe: Building a Developer Cult | What makes Stripe a favorite of developers, the advantages of building a cult, and the how the little things add up for developers | Jack Gecawich | 7/20/2020 | API Producers |
| What is Developer Experience (DX)? | Developer Experience is a term with a self-declaring meaning — the experience of developers — but it eludes definition in the sense that people invoke it at different times for different reasons referring to different things. | Chris Coyier | 6/15/2020 | Overview |
| Developer Experience Metrics | In my view the first step to create DX metrics is to already have full mastery over UX metrics, but why? Because DX is a strand within UX, that is developers who use your product, even if extremely technical users, are still users who will be impacted if your product has a bad UX. | Albert Cavalcante | 5/11/2020 | API Producers |
| Why Your API Needs a Dedicated Developer Experience Team | How can API companies improve their overall process and deliver the high-quality experience their users want? One of the best answers to that question is: Focus on creating a dedicated developer experience team that can empower your users by making it easier to understand, easier to build, and easier to integrate (particularly if your company develops customer-facing APIs). | James Messinger | 3/11/2020 | API Producers |
| 100 Days of Developer eXperience | Most of the 100 Days of Developer eXperience posts are combination of empirical quotes from developers and facts from scientific articles. | Jarkko Moilanen | 11/6/2019 | Many audiences (collection) |
| Why Developer Experience Matters | With the rise of API companies and technical products focused on developers, there is increasing focus on their developer experience. Product managers, marketers, and engineers alike have an interest in evaluating and improving how a developer uses their technical product. | Adam DuVander | 10/1/2019 | API Producers |
| Tiny Wins | I recently shipped two things at GitHub that had an impact beyond my wildest dreams. The amount of gratitude and love that spilled out of the community is like nothing I’ve seen before. But the things I shipped weren’t these huge, meaty projects. They were tiny. | Joel Califa | 1/30/2018 | Tooling Producers (UXD) |
| The Best Practices for a Great Developer Experience (DX) | Developer Experience (DX) is the equivalent to User Experience (UX) when the user of the software or system is a developer. DX describes the experience developers have when they use your product, be it client libraries, SDKs, frameworks, open source code, tools, API, technology or service. DX shares some ideas and philosophies from UX design (or HCI), but builds on these with an eye towards modern technology and standards. | Sam Jarman | 10/6/2017 | API Producers |
| Building a Developer Experience Team at Sendgrid | As we scaled up to hundreds of employees, many new PMs, designers, and engineers ended up working on the product who didn’t share that same explicit understanding of our developer customers. Slowly, but surely, the overall DX around SendGrid suffered. | Scott Williamson | 4/12/2017 | API Producers (Engineering Managers) |
| What is API Developer Experience and Why It Matters | API developer experience is a relatively novel focus aimed to improve API design so it provides a seamless experience to developers when writing software. It can help increase programmers’ efficience and make it easier for developers to achieve goals on behalf of end users. | Sergio De Simone | 10/25/2015 | API Producers |
| APIs for Humans: The Rise of Developer Experience (DX) | The art of simplifying complex interactions into meaningful user experiences is an important competitive advantage for technology companies. But what if your product is an API and your end-users are developers? How do you design a good experience for them? | Freddy Rangel | 9/22/2015 | API Producers |
| Effective Developer Experience (DX) | When Apple introduced the iPhone, the device captured the imaginations of its users. Its features satisfied basic needs and also inspired ideas of what could be done when the Internet was always in your pocket. Eight months later, Apple made the iOS SDK available, transforming the iPhone from a product into a platform. | Jeremiah Lee | 3/24/2011 | Platform Producers |
Events
| Name | Location | Date |
|---|---|---|
| DevX Conf | Online | 4/28/2021 |
Jobs
| Position | Company | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Developer Experience Engineer | Cypress | Atlanta |
| Head of Developer Experience | EasyPost | San Francisco |
| Product Manager, Developer Experience | Gusto | San Francisco, Denver, New York, Remote |
| Sr Director, Developer Experience | Paypal | Remote (US) |
| Software Engineer, Developer Experience | Square | San Francisco |
| Product Manager, Developer Experience | Square | San Francisco |
| Senior Engineer, Developer Experience | Ticketmaster | Remote (US) |
| Engineer, Developer Experience | Chromatic | Remote |
| Community Engineer, Developer Experience | Chromatic | Remote |
Products
2018 - Current
| Name | Description | Founded Year |
|---|---|---|
| Apideck | Apideck provides access to a single integration layer with a rapidly growing ecosystem of APIs. | 2018 |
| Appwrite | Appwrite is a secure end-to-end backend server for Web, Mobile, and Flutter developers that is packaged as a set of Docker containers for easy deployment | 2020 |
| Bannerbear | Bannerbear auto-generates social media visuals, ecommerce banners, and dynamic email images. | 2019 |
| Budibase | Budibase helps you build internal tools on your own infrastructure in minutes. | 2019 |
| Cerbos | Cerbos is decoupled, open-source and low-toil application access control. | 2021 |
| Chromatic | Chromatic automates gathering UI feedback, visual testing, and documentation, so developers can iterate faster with less manual work. | 2017 |
| Doppler | Doppler helps developers manage their API keys across their projects. | 2018 |
| Feedback Fish | A simple way to collect feedback & make your customers happy. | 2020 |
| Fig | Fig adds visual apps, shortcuts, and autocomplete to the terminal. | 2020 |
| Flightcontrol | Fullstack Deploy Platform that brings Vercel's world-class DX to your own cloud. Supports both containers & serverless functions, and is optimized for fullstack Next.js & Blitz.js apps | 2021 |
| Gitpod | Gitpod automates the provisioning of ready-to-code development environments. | 2019 |
| HostedHooks | HostedHooks is a webhooks sending as a service platform for developers | 2021 |
| Inspect | Inspect helps you debug mobile web apps and websites on iOS devices. | 2020 |
| Knock | Knock is a notifications-as-a-service platform. Send notifications to multiple channels such as in-app, email, push, Slack and more with a single API call. | 2021 |
| Linear | Linear helps streamline software projects, sprints, tasks, and bug tracking. | 2019 |
| Livecycle | Livecycle is the inclusive, async collaboration platform for product-centric teams. | 2022 |
| Modulz | Closing the gap between design and dev. Building open source libraries such as Radix and Stitches. | 2018 |
| Nhost | Nhost is a open source Firebase alternative with GraphQL. | 2019 |
| PlanetScale | PlanetScale is a serverless database platform that you can start in seconds. | 2018 |
| Port | Port is a unified and self service Developer Portal | 2022 |
| Prefect | Prefect is the easiest way to automate data pipelines. | 2018 |
| Railway | Railway helps you develop code in a cloud that feels local. | 2020 |
| Raycast | Raycast lets you control your tools with a few keystrokes. | 2020 |
| Render | Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites. | 2018 |
| Roboflow | Roboflow is a developer tool for building computer vision models faster and more accurately. | 2019 |
| Supabase | Supabase is the open source Firebase alternative. | 2020 |
| SuperTokens | SuperTokens is an open source alternative to Auth0, Okta, Firebase Auth and AWS Cognito. | 2019 |
| Svix | Svix makes sending webhooks easy and reliable by offering webhooks sending as a service. | 2021 |
| Sturdy | Real-Time Version Control. Share, and iterate on code together. Like Slack instead of email when coding as a team. | 2021 |
| Temporal | Temporal enables its users to build and operate resilient applications using developer-friendly primitives. | 2019 |
| Warrant | Warrant provides APIs and infrastructure to help developers implement authorization and access control in their apps. | 2021 |
| WorkOS | WorkOS provides APIs to make applications enterprise-ready. | 2018 |
2014 - 2017
| Name | Description | Founded Year |
|---|---|---|
| CodeSandbox | CodeSandbox is a free, instant, collaborative sandboxes for rapid web development. | 2017 |
| CodeStream | CodeStream puts team chat directly into most popular IDEs, making it easier for developers to talk about code & write software together. | 2017 |
| Fauna | Fauna is a transactional database delivered as a scalable cloud API with native GraphQL. | 2015 |
| Fly.io | Fly.io runs application servers close to users. | 2017 |
| Formspree | Formspree lets developers add working forms to their website in minutes, no backend needed. | 2015 |
| Gatsby | Gatsby is an open source web development tool and framework which is customizable and extensible for any purpose. | 2015 |
| GitLab | GitLab is a web-based open source Git repository manager with wiki and issue tracking features and built-in CI/CD. | 2014 |
| GraphCMS | GraphCMS is the GraphQL-native Headless Content Platform to create, enrich, federate, and deliver content programmatically and API-first with versatile GraphQL content APIs and a novel approach in external data sourcing. | 2017 |
| Hasura | Hasura provides instant realtime GraphQL APIs. | 2017 |
| Insomnia | Insomnia is a cross-platform REST client, built on top of Electron. | 2016 |
| LaunchDarkly | LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform for software teams. | 2014 |
| Mux | Mux is a video platform designed to make video streaming and analytics possible for every development team. | 2015 |
| Netlify | Netlify is a unified platform that automates code to create high-performant, easily-maintainable sites, and web-apps. | 2014 |
| PopSQL | PopSQL is a modern, collaborative SQL editor for teams. | 2017 |
| Postman | Postman is the collaboration platform for API development. | 2014 |
| Prisma | Prisma enables its users to access all of their databases in a single GraphQL query. | 2016 |
| RapidAPI | RapidAPI is an API marketplace that enables developers to find and connect to APIs. | 2015 |
| Readme | Readme provides every company the ability to quickly create beautiful documentation, and build loyal, productive developer communities. | 2014 |
| Replit | Replit is a browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) built for cross-platform collaborative coding. | 2016 |
| Retool | Retool is a fast way of building internal applications. | 2017 |
| Split | Split is a feature delivery platform that builds software for engineering teams to build products. | 2015 |
| Strapi | Strapi helps developers to easily build, deploy, and manage APIs. | 2016 |
| Vercel | Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. | 2015 |
| LambdaTest | LambdaTest provides seamless testing experience on 3000+ real devices & browsers. | 2017 |
2010 - 2013
| Name | Description | Founded Year |
|---|---|---|
| Algolia | Algolia is a search platform that enables companies to deliver fast and relevant digital experiences. | 2012 |
| Auth0 | Auth0 is an identity management platform for web, mobile, IoT, and internal applications. | 2013 |
| BrowserStack | BrowserStack provides seamless testing experience on 2000+ real devices & browsers. | 2011 |
| Datadog | Datadog offers monitoring and analytics for cloud-based workflows. | 2010 |
| DigitalOcean | DigitalOcean provides a cloud platform to deploy, manage, and scale applications of any size. | 2012 |
| Docker | Docker provides an open platform for building, shipping, and running distributed applications. | 2013 |
| Elastic | Elastic makes data usable in real time and at scale for search, logging, and analytics. | 2012 |
| Expo | Expo lets developers build universal native apps that work across Android, iOS, and the web by writing them once in just JavaScript. | 2013 |
| Firebase | Firebase is a mobile platform that develops apps that grow users base on iOS, Android, or the Web. | 2011 |
| HashiCorp | HashiCorp is a company that solves development, security, and operations challenges in infrastructure. | 2012 |
| Nylas | Nylas provides an API platform that enables developers to quickly and process user data from any email and calendar. | 2013 |
| Mailtrap | Mailtrap provides a Email sandbox service. | 2011 |
| Plaid | Plaid provides companies with the tools and access needed for the development of a digitally-enabled financial system. | 2013 |
| Pusher | Pusher provides a hosted API service for adding real-time bi-directional. | 2010 |
| Runscope | Runscope develops tools that support the modern application development life cycle. | 2013 |
| Segment | Segment provides infrastructure to collect, unify, and connect data among different providers. | 2011 |
| Sentry | Sentry is a developer of an application monitoring platform that helps developers monitor apps in real time to catch bugs early. | 2012 |
| Snowflake | Snowflake is a cloud data platform that provides a data warehouse-as-a-service designed for the cloud. | 2012 |
| Stripe | Stripe is a developer-oriented commerce company helping small and large companies accept web and mobile payments. | 2010 |
| Uploadcare | Uploadcare is a file uploading, media processing & content delivery for modern web apps. | 2011 |
| Webflow | Webflow is a visual web design platform, CMS, and hosting provider for building production websites and prototypes. | 2013 |
2000 - 2009
| Name | Description | Founded Year |
|---|---|---|
| Atlassian | Atlassian provides collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. | 2002 |
| Cloudflare | Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that provides online services to protect and accelerate websites online. | 2009 |
| Dynatrace | Dynatrace helps DevSecOps teams tame cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation. | 2005 |
| GitHub | GitHub provides code hosting services that allow developers to build software for open source and private projects. | 2008 |
| Heroku | Heroku is a platform as a service that provides services to create, run, and scale web and mobile apps. | 2007 |
| JetBrains | JetBrains is a software vendor specializing in the creation of productivity-enhancing tools for software developers and teams. | 2007 |
| Liferay | Liferay makes software that helps companies create digital experiences on web, mobile and connected devices. | 2004 |
| MongoDB | MongoDB is a general purpose, document-based, distributed database built for modern application developers and for the cloud era. | 2007 |
| MuleSoft | MuleSoft makes it easy to connect data from any system to create connected experiences. | 2006 |
| OutSystems | OutSystems is a low-code platform that enables businesses to develop, deploy, and manage enterprise-grade apps. | 2001 |
| Splunk | Splunk provides software that monitors, reports, and analyzes real-time machine data. | 2002 |
| Twilio | Twilio is a cloud communication company that enables users to build voice, VoIP, and SMS apps via a web API. | 2008 |
Research
| Title | Highlights | Institution | Year of Publication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Towards an Empirically-Based IDE: An Analysis of Code Size and Screen Space | The average length of functions per programming language: Java (8.87 lines) / C++ (19.48 lines) / Python (15.60) / JavaScript (21.68 lines). The average line width: Java (70.27 chars) / C++ (74.96 chars) / Python (72.75 chars) / JavaScript (66.32 chars). | University of Tennessee | 2019 |
| Measuring program comprehension: A large-scale field study with professionals | In a study with Java and C# projects, they found that most of the time the developer spends is with Navigation and Comprehension. Here's a summary: Comprehension (57.62%) / Navigation (23.96%) / Editing (5.02%) / Others (13.40%). Data sample: 78 developers across 7 projects over 3,148 working hours | Singapore Management University | 2018 |
| Developer Experience: Concept and Definition | Developer experience could be defined as a means for capturing how developers think and feel about their activities within their working environments | University of Helsinki | 2012 |
Videos
| Title | Presenter | Duration | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Next Generation of Developer-First Products | Zeno Rocha | 43:41 | 5/5/2022 |
| Building DevX Teams | Cirpo Cinelli | 42:04 | 5/5/2022 |
| Things nobody told you about developer experience (DX) | DX Doctor | 17:02 | 11/23/2019 |
| The only way how to have happy & productive developers | Vratislav Kalenda | 25:18 | 12/8/2018 |
| The Seven Deadly Sins of Developer Onboarding | Cristiano Betta | 28:03 | 11/13/2017 |
| JS UX: Writing code for humans | Lea Verou | 1:09:04 | 9/26/2016 |
| The Elements of Developer Experience (DX) Design | Stephen Boak | 5:24 | 8/4/2016 |