dxday 2024
14 Mar 2024 at Hotel Savoia Regency, Bologna

5

Have you been in the situation where you need to remember what is this code written by you some time ago about? Not even saying about you trying to understand someone else's code? GitHub Copilot Chat is a new way to code, where you can write code, fix bugs, write tests, and explain code to yourself and others in a chat window in a sidebar or inline. In this session, I'll demonstrate how GitHub Copilot Chat takes developer experience to the next level and how it can help you be more productive in your day-to-day work.

The deepest desire of a developer on the first day of work is to be assigned a task to complete. Or not? We are not cogs in a machine; companies are communities of people and do not thrive on efficiency alone. I will tell you about how the HR department at SparkFabrik has organized the recruitment, onboarding, and support processes, drawing from our experiences as developers. I'll show what we have done to streamline, optimize, and make our branch transparent. We will discuss the still-open challenges and some elephants in the room that, in my opinion, are increasingly ignored in discussions in this sector.

Building software today is hard. In order to build complex software, you need to use different tools, api, frameworks and languages, which in the long run will lead to fragmentation, slowing you down. The solution to this problem is to bring all the tools together into a unified interface. In this talk we will learn the benefit that a developer portal can bring into your organization, enhancing productivity and tackling problems such as Discoverability, System ownership, Fragmentation, Duplication, Context Switching. We will learn how you can easily build your own Developer Portal on top of Backstage, an Open Source framework for building Developer Portals adopted by companies like Spotify, Unity, Netflix, American Airlines, and Epic Games. We will share the lessons learned and latest tips from the hundreds of Backstage adopters and thousands of contributors.

3

Git heavily influenced our developer tooling, and much of our developer tooling revolves around the 'post commit'. But, what if the commit was the last step, which came after our continuous integration? And, not before? We couldn’t do this before because we simply didn't have machines powerful enough to run our builds. With cloud development environments, that's no longer the case. And with AI does this mean that we're on the cusp of a revolution of the pull request flow that has been so prevalent. Is the combination of AI 'pair programming' and cloud based development the push that will take the industry away form the typical pull request UI and force us to completely re-think our developer experience? And what if our outer loop will be completely removed and consumed by workspaces in the cloud?'

3

In the dynamic landscape of developer experience, documentation often takes a back seat, relegated to a role of retrospective record-keeping. This talk challenges the status quo by advocating for Documentation-Driven Development (DDD) as a pivotal, proactive force shaping the very essence of developer experience. Beyond code implementation, we explore the continuous nature of documentation, presenting it as an ongoing dialogue rather than a static artifact. We contend that this approach not only facilitates project evolution comprehension but also enriches team collaboration and knowledge sharing. Join us on a journey taking a real life example into consideration, where documentation transcends its traditional role, becoming an active participant in the developer experience narrative—from initiation, through the development lifecycle, to ongoing refinement. Discover how embracing Documentation-Driven Development cultivates a richer, more cohesive, and ultimately more satisfying developer experience.

Join us on our journey through the land of Developer Experience as we empower our engineers to deliver value with confidence and remove gatekeepers. Throughout this adventure, we will learn that empathy, systemic thinking and challenging the status quo are all prerequisites needed to achieve our goals. To navigate the maze that is modern day software development, we need to look beyond the toil and shift our attention to the big picture. We bust the myth that the Wizard has all the answers. In truth, we had them all along.

2

Developing in today's days has never been so powerful but it is also incredibly complex and this is challenging the teams and the businesses to deliver fast a good quality software. In this speech Francesco summarises his experience of 25+ years in the IT industry, including the work as Product Manager for Backstage (Spotify) and now as part of the Docker's team. In particular, you are going to learn about the trajectory of the developer experience in the market and what you, as a developer, should be able to leverage and use very soon. For sure sooner than you expect.

In recent years, Developer Experience (DX) has emerged as a pivotal concern for companies, gaining significant attention for its impact on productivity and innovation. In this panel we will explore why DX has become a hot topic now, questioning whether it represents a new paradigm or an evolution of something else We'll delve into the challenges of defining DX precisely and offer insights on how organizations can embark on improving it. Join us as we unravel the complexities of Developer Experience and its growing importance in the tech industry