100 Days of Developer eXperience Daily unfiltered & opinionated posts written July - November 2019. Follow #100DaysDX

Why did I do it? This question has been posed to me couple of times. There’s three reasons. I’ve been interested about DX for some years now. I started writing a book about DX around Oct 2018 “Build for Developers”. The landing page for the book is still online. I just got stuck and there was al...

First of all, all developers are worthy and skilfull. Some of them become hackers, the top 1% of software/hardware engineers. Hacker is what the media started to connect with negative stories in the past and built an image in our heads of somewhat criminal and dangerous person. Hacker term has or...

We have created a API docs engine as part of the platform development. The input can be RAML or OAS files and the result is stripe style 3 column API docs with generated code examples for each endpoint and method for selected programming languages. The last part of it is expanding now to support ...

The easiest is to evaluate the design based on a set of guidelines. Nielsen’s “heuristic evaluation” guidelines describe 10 properties an expert can use to check any design (http://www. nngroup.com/articles/ten-usabilityheuristics/) that apply equally well to APIs as to regular user interfaces. H...

Probably I have discussed the topic in many ways already, but I’m a “child” of open source communities and the significant role of those is not crystal clear to all. It’s not a secret that developers love open source driven tools and development. About 65% of professional developers on Stack Ove...

Many of us have heard about API Design Guides. Probably less of us have used those though. Even less have written such a document. I would guess that most of the people messign with APIs see the API Design Guide as something that defines error handling, naming patterns and all sort of detail-alik...

In the post #32 “SLA from developer’s point of view” I discussed briefly the current SLA practices which are more or less ridiculous. SLA is not defined in machine redable format and practically the only measure is availability “Our SLA is 99.9% monthly”. Absurd! How dare you?! Apparently the ne...

You have heard dozens of times presentations telling you that great developer experience is this and that, you’ve seeen the same almost identical list of tools, documents and other so many times. And you just take it “Yes sir! If you say so”. They don’t tell you what is developer experience. They...

Help me to be productive One of the aims of great developer experience(DX) is to increase the productivity of the consuming developers. Great and clear design and process increases the productivity of API builders (internal DX). I’ve touched the productivity topic already in the beginning of the...

Open source changed the world We all know Open source movement changed the industry in the past. Shining stars like Finnish origin Linus Torvalds we followed and heard for years. RedHat showed us how to combine business and open source. For the last years Microsoft has turned towards open source...

In yesterday’s post I touched the Developer Relations topic by comparing some of the results from two reports “State of developer relations 2019” (28 pages) and “The State of API 2019” (62 pages). DevRel still feels a bit fuzzy and thus I started to look for things the team is used. The first th...

I took two reports I had read some time ago under review again since I lacked a good idea for the post. The mentioned reports are “State of developer relations 2019” (28 pages) and “The State of API 2019” (62 pages). Neither of them are academic but conducted by companies which might affect the ...

The title of this post is stolen from a tweet by Mario Fusco and inspired me to write about it although I’ve touched the subject in earlier posts. The sentence “A good API is not just easy to use but also hard to misuse” just hits the nerve! Good API - easy to learn & use but hard to misus...

You should not just jump to libraries As part of Platform of Trust future I’ve been tossing the idea of libraries since March. So far we have provided just APIs, but the amount of APIs is rising. This means that platform consumers need to learn more and more APIs. We are developing still maturin...

According to Deming 95% of variation in the performance of a system (organization) is caused by the system itself and only 5% is caused by the people. This also known as Deming’s 95/5 rule. This sounds counter-intuitive and people often argue that having great people would solve the problems. The...

Some still think that great DX is achieved by pushing API out and generating the docs with some automation tool. Yes, that might be a good start and what’s good about that is the automation part. You should automate in every corner you can in your API development workfow. The more manual work it ...

Pneumonia is won and I’m back in business although getting 100% in shape will most likely take couple of months. I was supposed to talk at the Platform Summit in Stockholm on coming Wednesday, but my doctor advised me not to travel yet. Blogging was not mentioned. VPI - Value Proposition Interfa...

Yesterday after the post (Purpose of API Evaluation Framework) it kind became clear to me. We do not discuss the role of API designer too much but instead focus on technical details often listed in API Design Guide. And that is at best. Often the discussion does not even go that far. API Desig...

Benefits of using an API are mostly seen if an API make it easy for a developer to understand and reuse its functions that indicates usability of an API. An aspect that plays a major role in the decision of whether an API will be used is the usability of an API. APIs can have various usability is...

Despite of the fever (38,6) last night I did spend some time on this today. The post is coming from under the blanket. I stumbled upon interesting article “Should We Move to Stack Overflow? (2015)”. It discusses the role of Stack Overflow (SO) in support. We all know that a lot of the developers...