DevEx 101: What is DevEx?
Tags: devex, devops, productivity
Published: 2023-05-02 11:40:39

What have you done today to increase your productivity? What did your team manager, department heads or organization do today to increase your productivity? Welcome to developer experience, where we explore engineering practices that increases your work life.

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## What is DevEx about?

If you feel like your company does not take action in bettering developer experience because they don't see the profit, this might just the thing for you!

**DevEx**, **DX** or **Developer Experience** is a set of practice that focuses on providing the support, usability and documentation that developers deserve. In exchange employers see results in increased deployment frequency, decreased lead time for changes, recovery time and change failure rate and better employee retention rate. Sounds like a fairy tale! Investing in removing friction from day-to-day work is not a new idea however making it measurable is a lot easier with the tools popping up on the market.

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## Improving on-boarding speed and experience

Everyone loves onboarding! You are a fresh new employee, with a checklist that guides through from setting up your developer environment to getting your first feature released. You will have your first commit in prod in your first week. It makes you feel good, not pressured, because the expectations are clear and leave you plenty of time to network with your colleagues and do the important compliance training. (No, I don't know how to make compliance fun.)

If this isn't your experience, you should stick around to read the upcoming articles about
* How to build and on-boarding checklist?
* How to build self-documenting software delivery life cycle?
* Pop-up dev environment with Microsoft DevBox

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## Making Information accessible

> Just look at the documentation, it's on Confluence!

Famous last words before pointing at a documentation that is either outdated or assumes knowledge only that one developer has who has no time to explain it. Familiar? Everyone knows that easily accessible information can take productivity to the next level. We also know that writing documentation and doing knowledge transfer sessions are time consuming, low priority and difficult.

Let me help you by some free templates and tutorials on
* How to build and document your software delivery life cycle using markdown?
* Get better with Swagger!
* Design Decision Documents made simple
* Software Documentation Formulas to steal from the Opensource Community

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## Getting Feedback As Soon As Possible

I will be honest here. I hate to receive PR comments on a typo. I hate when the CD pipeline fails on the tests because I forgot to comment back a block of code. I am in rage when the linter fails because I did not run it on my local machine. I am the only one to blame here... or am I?

* Do you know how to set Pull Request gates to run tests before the code is merged?
* Do you have pre-push hooks to check your code before making it to the codebase? Is it annoyingly slow?
* Are the test failure notifications going to spam? Or just sit there abandoned in the developers mailbox?

Yes, we will cover that!

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## Preventing Burnout

I bet you don't think about how Google works when you search for something. It just does.

People underestimate how much the tools we use contribute to our stress levels. Usually it's not even the fault of the tool really, it's just simply matter of configuration. We will look into lesser-known features of developer tools that saves you 10 minutes that's just enough for a good water cooler chat.

* We will look into building career road-maps to help developers find their next goal.

* Facilitating mob-coding to make everyday work feel like a hackathon? Will do!

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If you reached this far, I hope a couple of topics grabbed your attention and will return for the articles and tutorials posted bi-weekly.

Let's make work a better place together!