Inspired by today's lab on Forge, thanks Koen!

• A nice scaffolding project, that helps you create runnable skeletons of Java EE aps.
• Didn't use it much before - so first proper hands-on lab on Forge.
• Great project, gets the job done, *but* needs a lot of love and detail polishing.

By Developer

for Developers

• We suck in making UIs as devels, and we know it.
• We have UX people for designing wireframes, designers / graphics and coders for the end product eg. cutting to images, HTML / CSS, etc.
• What about developer experience?

Why is developer experience important

• (Hope everyone knows it's important already so this slide is theoretically not necessary.)
• Without developer mindshare we have lost, please reward your contributors & dev consumers.
• Developers are quite picky, lazy and easily migrate elsewhere or fork stuff - eg. Hudson/Jenkins, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, etc.
• People like to learn & have expertise in something - reward on its own.

What is developer experinece?

• When was the last time you screamed in front of a dev. tool?
• We do complex platform / generic SW, solving real-world issues.
• SW quality is usually quite good nowadays.
• Tiny things matter - polish your tools.
• If you are not the "polisher" type - ask bachelor / master students, newbie upstream contributors.
• Make these tasks a low-hanging fruit.

Examples of good developer experience

• Code is publicly hosted on a site using Pull requests / Merge request workflow.
• No patches on mailing lists! => see my other talk
• Clear roadmap published on dev mailing list / forum.
• Accesible chat, eg. IRC, Atlassian Hipchat, whatever suits the team.
• Documentation is available - no, code does not count as documentation!

Jenkins

• The good ol' CI server you all know and use (hopefully you use CI, if not you should fix that ASAP, see my other talk).
• One of the most open upstream projects.
• Not always good to be as open and welcoming
  • "Use the Force Luka" scandal.
  • Ironically a guy writing book on code review in gerrit.
  • But hey nobody is perfect.

Doing CLI?

• Include loading indicator for example rotating semigraphics like: | / -  ...
• Provide programmatic API.
• Maintain the contract.
• Properly divide the outputs & use logging properly.
• It always helps to have good ol' UNIX/Linux style of CLI.

Doing desktop application?

• Enable power-users to edit configs outside your app.
• Provide programatic API.
• Think about modularity & plugin architecture.
• Don't constantly change UI - this is more of an UX thing, but you know how easily this can annoy devels.

Generally

• Look around you!
  • Are similar apps integrated with other apps?
  • Provide plug-ins / integration options from the beginning.
• Maintain contract.
• Don't package the world, leverage the live system.
  • This issue is going to get worse with containers imho.

Questions?

Thanks for being awesome audience!