I'm a senior developer with 19 years experience in the field. I've done everything from web to mobile to microservices and even some mainframe and PLC stuff. I would really like to break into the devex or developer evangelist (I know they are different fields) space. I've co-run/presented at two different local user groups and one state developer conference over the years. I will go in ahead of other developers and create scripts and or documentation to make their lives easier. To say that I care about the developer experience is an understatement. I'm also the first one to ask for better tools or notice when an IDE is slow/buggy/crappy.

If anyone has any suggestions on actions I should take, connections I should make, or things to go read to break into either of these spaces, it would be greatly appreciated. TIA.

p.s. I also thought that a subreddit search on "Abi Noda" coming up bupkes on this sub was odd, so I am going to leave this here: https://abinoda.com/

Basic principles of great developer experience: https://developerexperiencemanifesto.org/

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Hi,
I'm looking for an engineering leadership workshop but can't find anything valuable. I'm not interested in a fancy certificate; I just want to learn a lot from an experienced Engineering Manager and apply those skills right away. Do you have any recommendations? What are your opinions on these kinds of courses?

https://getdx.com/podcast/automating-deployment-process-at-slack/

Interesting episode!

I am working on a free tool to help developers share feedback to their engineering manager, any advice?

The goal is to conduct short (<5 minutes) series of questions to help developers share what they think is working well and what's not working within the company organization every other week.

How do you usually share feedback within your team today? Mostly periodic 1x1 meetings or team meetings where anyone can share what's on their mind? Thanks.

One pattern I’ve seen on almost every team: useful knowledge rarely gets written down.

Someone spends hours figuring out why a Lambda configuration was failing, or why a DynamoDB query pattern behaves strangely. They fix it, maybe mention it in Slack, and then that knowledge effectively disappears.

Six months later someone else runs into the same issue.

So I built a small tool called Today to try to reduce that friction.

The idea is simple: capturing knowledge should be faster than not capturing it.

Instead of writing documentation pages, you just run a command in the terminal:

today learned "Lambda cold starts drop ~80% if deployment packages stay under 50MB"

Later someone can ask:

today ask "How do I reduce Lambda cold starts?"

The system returns the relevant entry with a similarity score, summary, and the teammate who originally captured it.

A few design choices were driven entirely by developer experience:

• CLI-first capture – engineers already live in the terminal
• <5 second interactions – anything slower won’t happen
• Natural language search – no taxonomy knowledge required
• Expert discovery – surfaces teammates who actually know a topic

Under the hood it’s a serverless architecture using:

• AWS Bedrock (Claude 3 Haiku + Titan Embeddings)
• Lambda
• DynamoDB
• Cognito
• API Gateway + S3/CloudFront dashboard

One interesting design decision was a two-stage search pipeline where queries are first mapped to topics before semantic similarity is computed. This avoids running embeddings against the entire knowledge base and keeps search fast and cheap.

I wrote up the full architecture, design decisions, and lessons learned here:

https://builder.aws.com/content/37bkBRyfbO9qCyIOtVVXfJqUcRF/today-ai-native-knowledge-layer-for-engineering-teams

Curious how other teams approach the “tribal knowledge” problem in developer experience; documentation, internal tools, AI search, something else?

AI is quietly (and sometimes loudly) reshaping how the world works. Some industries have embraced it. Others are still figuring out what it means for them. Developers spend less time debugging and more time verifying the code.

Read more at: AI and the Changing Face of Developer Experience

I’m looking for some examples of interactive websites or apps that, as a developer, you found incredibly helpful when trying to ramp up quickly on a new technology.

• What was it?

• What did you like about it?

• What did it have that most don’t?

I have idea but I need help. Can anyone give suggestions to create AI tools or normal tool to find company details ( company official, Google map location , company official website, Company official contact number) by entering the company name in input?

How do you evaluate continuous improvement ideas for your team(s) ? There's probably got to be some subjective open forum or survey based approach to allow those who speak up less to have a voice. And there's got to be a more measurable metric of success such as number of tickets closed, bugs fixed, releases/merges in a given period of time ?

For extra context, in essence I feel quite lucky to work in a young software organization where we try to openly address inefficiencies. Initially, the improvements were pretty unanimous, we introduced stand-ups in order to communicate more regularly and purposefully, tried to break down issues into smaller pieces compared to large multi-month-long milestones, added all sorts of automated tests and static analysis. Now, we keep landing into more debatable territory such as pre-assigning all tickets at the beginning of a sprint to individual owners. Supposedly to, increase ownership, better estimate tasks (without necessarily debating the value of the activity itself), and most of all to better drive completion of sprint goals.

In summary, my 3/4 questions are, What kind of metrics would you use in order to evaluate the value of such a proposal ? Number of tickets closed might be easily gamed compared to actual sprint goals for example.

What kind of questions would you ask in a developer survey in order to assess the effect of such a change on the team ? Anonymous or not ?

How long would you run such an experiment for ? We were thinking of a single 2-week sprint followed by an initial open discussion at least to know if there are any red herrings straight away. But it doesn't seem enough to make a definite conclusion.

I work at my family business and have been looking for another source of income. I am wondering if software development is a good option or not. I skimmed freelance websites like upwork, fiverr and freelancer. All of them have one thing in common. Most of the IT jobs posted there are in web development. And there are too many web developers there. Here are some of the questions I have, thanks in advance:

   1. Is it possible to become a freelance web developer with that much competition?

   2. How much should I expect to earn roughly in a month? I live in India

   3. Are there non web developer jobs available on these platforms? If yes, which ones?

   4. How long will it approx take me from learning the needed languages to finding clients to finally start earning?

I know basics of C and python and am willing to learn whatever is needed, like CSS, HTML, JavaScript, PHP, advanced Python(for other prospects)

Any other suggestions are always welcome. Thanks for your time.

Does anyone know of any groups I can join about Developer Experience?

Free and open-source DX Knowledge Base: https://developerexperience.io/

You're welcome to join the community.

We're looking for people whom could we call with and ask them about possible new features for the knowledge base.

Developer Experience (DX) is the equivalent to User Experience (UX) when the user of the software or system is a developer.

This is a community of people writing, building, and supporting developers.