Developer Experience: Because Coders Are People Too!

I am declaring a personal crusade to improve Drupal's "Developer Experience," which I hereby abbreviate as "DX." User experience can be defined as "the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system." A product's UX affects a user's interest, ability, and enjoyment when using a product. If a product's UX sucks, people will not use it if they have a choice or hate using it if they do not. Well, guess what? Software engineers are people, too. When creating a software product that is intended to be used by other developers, the UX includes the experience of those developers as they write code for the product. But software engineers aren't exactly like normal people and the kinds of issues developers face are very different from the issues the end users of the product face, so it seems logical to talk about DX distinctly from UX just to keep the target audience straight. My first attempt at a definition for DX is "the overall experience, satisfaction, and efficiency a software developer has when using a software development platform." I'm sure a better definition is possible. The Drupal community has not historically been great at UX design (mostly we're just a bunch of hackers) but recently has focused its enormous talents in this direction and started to make great strides. Somewhat surprisingly, we have also not historically been great at DX design. Drupal is quite powerful and flexible but unless you climb a fairly steep learning curve it can be hard to develop for. I have personally spoken with a number of web developers who have evaluated Drupal and found it too annoying, too unlike everything they have done before, and sometimes just too "backwards" for them to want to use it. There are many, many ways to improve Drupal's Developer Experience. Some are trivial, some are complex, and many are in between. Please bring your own to the workshop!