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Don't forget DevEx

Fernando Villalba, Senior Tech Evangelist at Humanitec

You need better DevEx in your life. If your goal is to deliver better software faster, any process improvement that does not improve the developer experience is wasted. Bad DevEx results in:

• Burnout: Developers spend most of their energy completing tasks that don’t produce immediate value, become unhappy, and leave.
• Slow software delivery: Too many processes and bad tooling slow down deployment cycle.
• Developer churn rate.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 (𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐄𝐱, 𝐃𝐗)?

DevEx is a cultural approach that aims to simplify all areas that don’t contribute to the creative output and the delivery of applications for developers. It is achieved by simplifying or eliminating the following concerns for developers:

• Configuration management: configuration drift and difficulties finding resource configuration for workloads.
• Infrastructure provisioning:  learning terraform, IaC, or the temptation to do ClickOps.
• Environment configuration: Creating new environments is easy, no need to specify configuration for each and every environment.
• Tedious processes: Processes that take too many steps or require too many third parties.
• Cognitive load: Good DevEx implements Standardization by Design, easing the task of making too many long-term judgment calls that require a lot of planning and thinking.
• Tooling with bad UX: Tooling that has a bad user experience, even if it offers more features, is very tiring to use because it takes longer to learn and is more tedious to use. Good DevEx picks and designs tools that favor usability over a disjointed feature stack.

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐝𝐨 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐎𝐩𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐄𝐱 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞?
Platform Engineering aims to implement Internal Developer Platforms, which often have a product owner and/or follow UX principles to make them user-friendly. Internal Developer Platforms solve the issues that make poor DevEx..

DevEx is not exclusive to DevOps. DevOps cultural practices still apply but DevEx put a sharper focus on developers user experience.

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 Have you seen this in-depth guide to Internal Developer Platforms?

🥐 Will platform engineering get loved to death?

🥐 According to this KubeCon panel, the rise of platform engineering won’t kill DevOps. But it might put an end to the tool sprawl DevOps unleashed.

🥐 Here’s why big data is pulling compute back on premises.

Last but not least, have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. Here are some highlights:

• Want to build your own platform or platform team? Check out Rebecca Murphey’s favorite article on the topic.
• Mohit Kalra’s client asked how we can use DevOps to create balance between developer freedom and cost control. The inquiry ignited this 🔥 discussion.
• Here’s how to convince your manager to get you an IDP.
• Paula Kennedy shared Syntasso’s new Platform Maturity model.
• New jobs and events are shared to the community every day! Check out our #jobs and #events channel to learn more.

There ain’t no party like a cloud-native party. Thanks to everyone who came out to House of Kube!

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

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