The API Gateway to hell

Developer Experience Is About Making Your Developers Happy.

Have you noticed how everyone values and focuses on great User Experience?
Of course — every company wants to make sure their product delivers a great experience for their users. But what about the experience for the developers of these amazing products? I am speaking about the whole flow of the development process. The tools, systems, APIs and processes that enable development teams to perform and create outstanding experiences.
This article aims to present you the concept of DevEx and to show you how great developer experience may look like.

When looking at experience from the point of view of a developer these are generally the things we care about:

Just as we need to look at our end-user when creating great UX, we need to look at each developer for great DevEx. Let me make this statement:

An API is an interface to other systems that developers use for data gathering or including functionality for their product. Examples are geographical databases to fetch location information and weather data.
As soon as a company aims to develop such an API and aims to provide other developers with access, it needs to think about DevEx.
Good DevEx for APIs can be quality assessed like so:

In the end APIs need to think of their interface as a product and developers as the end-users.

Develop teams can always make sure to enhance the DevEx on their own.
Internal interfaces should strive for the same quality aspects as public APIs.
New team members appreciate documentation and examples more than anything. There is nothing worse than being part of a project without any documentation. Also the local setup — IDEs, testing, deployment is highly important and can be greatly influenced by every member.
Architecture decisions, the use of certain programming languages or frameworks should be well documented and streamlined as far as possible.
Regular changes of context and environment lead to unneccessary productivity decrease and diversion.
You want to see how great your local setup is? These are the important questions to answer:

DevEx is about making your product development team happier by enabling them wherever possible. Companies that try to enhance DevEx have happier developer teams and thus better development cycles. But this approach can also be applied to Product Owners, Designers, Scrum Masters, Project Managers and all other members of the company. With great DevEx you will have less time consuming annoying tasks performed.
In the end its simple — Good DevEx means better code quality and less development cost!

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