Estimating engineering efficiency savings can help direct actions.

Developer Productivity’s definition matters. Discussing unclear concepts and optimizing unclear metrics wastes time. Two problems stood out to me when defining Developer Productivity (among many). First, the metric is ineffective for improving stakeholder and business outcomes. Second, the term’s ambiguity causes more problems than it solves for anyone defining it, learning about it, or discussing engineering optimization. Below are potential solutions: current¹ and traditional² Developer Productivity definitions for learners, more effective productivity metric uses for teams, and an alternate term for clearer optimization discussions.

User Experience (UX) has separate definitions for “a user experience” and “the field of User Experience”. Developer Experience (DX, DevEx) does not. The result is ambiguity between “a developer experience”, experience optimization, and engineering outcomes. This post disambiguates them by defining and contextualizing a developer experience, the field of Developer Experience (DX, DevEx), and DX’s relation to engineering outcomes.

Startup SaaS Company. Two years in. Funds running low. Our JavaScript is a ball of mud. One page costs $94k per year to maintain. 140 pages. How did we get here?

“What story do I want to tell?”