Developer Experience Supremacy: Here’s What Industrial Experts Say About It

As businesses overcome the post-COVID slumber and leap towards the digitization journey, they are sharpening their focus on developers as their go-to persona. Unsurprisingly, the importance of developers within and outside the business has grown multifold. As developer focus becomes the new norm for all business functions, will developer experience trump everything else?

To learn and interact more about the evolving developer experience, Freshworks conducted a Developer Summit on 22nd September 2022 in Bengaluru. The full-day event encompassed insightful tech sessions, a developer panel, Demo booths, and developer showcases filled with fun activities.

Below are excerpts from an insightful developer panel led by Satwik Hebbar, Senior Director of Engineering, Freshworks with Jadeja Dushyantsinh Anopsinh (Dushyant below), Advisor, Commudle, Harish Kotra, Platforms and Community Lead, AngelHack, Karthic Rao, Google Developer Expert in Machine learning and Ponvannan P, Co-Founder & CTO at Konnectify.

What is Developer experience (DX)?

Dushyant – “Developer experience encapsulates so many things, like the ability to allow developers to do what they want at that moment, whether it is about finding a particular sample code, or particular information, or looking for a use case for a particular API. So, if there is a way that an experience can encapsulate all of this, that is Developer experience for me.

In essence, Developer experience should be an extension of a Developer that brings out the best of me rather than making me think in a typical way of what a company wants to, or platform wants to look at. Firebase was fantastic; how they identified the use case good understanding of sample code, and documentation.”

Harish – “For me, it’s about how quickly I can get started on the external platform; how quickly can I see the ‘Hello World’ output on the platform. My personal favorite platform are Twilio, and Stripe. In terms of getting started – I’m a fan of fdk (Freshworks Developer Kit), and you inviting me to the Summit is also a great example of an enriching Developer experience!”

Karthic – “Developer experience to me would simply mean obsession for simplicity which is a natural extension of what previously was the fundamental longing to have for consumers in product management. It’s a similar extension to have that view with respect to the SaaS platform. Just that it now requires a different lens to have empathy for developers and really simplify it for them.

So yes, obsession with simplicity to make a developer successful with a particular product. Scaling, and administrating it should be simple; no one should require a 3-day training to be able to do that. We must make a lot of dumb choices, we have to stop doing some of the things that would have increased the complexity of the system, not just from the way it works but also from the end user perspective; that’s why it takes a different lens to actually simplify or to be obsessed to simplify things so that the developers can be extremely successful, pretty fast.”

Satwik – “Now that’s an interesting way to look at it – from the platform perspective as to how you build it such that you take challenges away from the developer’s hands and move it close to the platform as much as possible. Nice!”

Ponvannan – “I would say how you have user experience for developers per se is what I consider as Developer experience. So, if I have to code something for my experience, it would mean I have a framework, the libraries, and everything put in place, and if I get stuck, I have the support. So, combining everything around the product, and providing all the support is called the developer experience for me as a developer.”

Is DevX the new UX?

Satwik – “What kind of changes have you seen in the last decade or so, such that DX has become more important than the UX? What has led to it?”

Karthic – “The number one factor is bottoms-up developer adoption becoming a driving force for growth, sales, and revenue, for getting capital venture funding for start-ups. That has completely changed the landscape. Now so much money is being spent to ensure that DX comes first because now, if you want to go for series A, and series B then you need bottoms-up developer adoption for your product.”

“If developers are the ones who are going to discover your product, if they are the decision-makers, if they are the ones who are going to try your product, they are the ones who are going to build apps, then these are the numbers that you will show for your next funding. These are the numbers that are going to become the funnel for your revenue which means all your obsession from the product, marketing, decision makers, and every part of the developer lifecycle goes into the DX, and thus it becomes very important.”

Ponvanna – “If I have a low-code platform with the framework and library and if it is able to cut off 60% of my development time, then I don’t mind going ahead with Low Code. It should be open, with no compliance concerns.”

Harish – “From old school to today, there has been a lot of commoditization of services on platforms. What would previously take months, like building a Machine learning model and deploying it, is now an API call away from multiple service providers. Adoption, in terms of finding these platforms and then being able to experiment, is also helping to drive growth. That’s why DX is more relevant now than ever before.”

Satwik – “So Dushyant, what would be 2 or 3 areas that you would recommend our developers to ask for, where they should demand from the platform in terms of DX?”

Dushyant – “Many times, as a developer, we don’t realize how much power we have to influence the platform we are working on. We spend 8-10 hours a day working on it or some of us even bet our careers on it, but we never share our frustration with it.  So that is something that we should share with the platform or make them aware of, that “hey, this is my environment,” because they will understand the challenge only when they understand what environment you operate in.”

“Secondly, you should try to show them the mirror. That’s one thing I’ve done many times to platform companies I’ve worked for that is – I would like to be in your shoes, could you show me what’s happening? Because 99% times product managers or product developers, or engineers who are building that platform may have a blind spot on that. They may have their fancy internal systems; they may have their tools and applications and code snippets on top of it. They never really experienced what it could be like to be in someone else’s shoes. Ask for a roadmap, have clarity what’s upcoming, and if I have a pain point, is this going to be addressed in the next release.”

Peek into the future – one thing that developers as a community would love to experience?

Karthic – “There are a couple of areas that are pretty ripe for great development experience – AI, and the other is web3. DX, it’s still in a phase where its rapidly evolving to simplify the App development experience. Great developer experience could democratize the experience of App development.”

Harish – “For me, that would be a lot more abstraction from platforms so that the developers don’t have to worry about how data is stored, what is the security policy, and what are licenses I need to know about. Let them focus on coding, that’s all.”

Ponvanna – “Low code platform will define the DX. So, if I have a library, I have a framework, if I have 1000’s lines of code, and I’m able to solve the complex logic, then I’m sorted. I can focus on business problems to achieve the solution, and that’s how it will be transformational.”

Dushyant – “Many times as developers, we have struggled for the right kind of information, I would like to see if there can be an evolution of the platform, which is an extension of me. I’m a big believer of that idea – so at that moment when you are stuck, could there be a service or functionality so that whenever it could come in and give me contextual info - hey, you are using this, but maybe this is the right thing to do. So, some of those contextual, personalized information and education could make things better for DX.”