PS: this is a First Draft - brain dump of the sub topics I want to explore
Topics
- Onboarding
- Whenever someone new is onboarding, they’re a very good candidate for collaboration
- How much of your onboarding is self-service
- Speak to the 2 week threshold I’ve experienced
- How much of onboarding should’ve be self-service vs assisted?
- Keeping docs up to date
- Dan North’s Red carpet philosophy
- Trying to minimise the time/cost between a new dev joining the team, and being productive
- Stay Saasy - Optimize onboarding
- typical time to first pr.
- time to first ticket? feature? what metrics can help you get the pulse on the quality of your onboarding?
- why is it important
- readwise has a bunch of articles. this is worth its own note at this point😅
search queries:
"onboarding" || "dx" || "developer experience"
- What is DX
- Why does it matter
- Fast Feedback loops
- Types of cognitive load, and how you can reduce them
- How this ties into complexity
- this might be redundant. one of the core ideas of improving dx is reducing cognitive load associated with delivering customer value
- There could be some trivial examples of increased cognitive load associated with everyday development that we aren’t even aware of
- Where does platform engineering fit in
- Tools to increase dev confidence when pushing, merging
- Local experience
- Pull Request process
- Deploying
- iteration velocity
- Are there manual steps pre/during/post deployment that slow the process down?
- What other areas of the sdlc can be worked on?
- Tools not limited to development, e.g., tools for comms (Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.)
- Effects of scrum/agile processes on DX
- “All software systems are sociotechnical systems”
- Collaboration between devs and QA
- How would you describe delivery efficiency? & how does improving developer experience help here?
- Loom by John Cutler semi related to this topic
- Improving DX can reduce developer burnout
- devs actually want to ship. it feels good & has a restorative nature.
- On Finding out how to improve DX
- Talk to your devs. those closest to the work. they’re well aware of the friction
- Surveys & polls. keep these short & engaging. & actually action out stuff based off the feedback, if you don’t want to see engagement fizzle.
References
- LeeRob
- What is DX
- DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity - there’s a few highlights in my readwise that could be good to cite.
- https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/legacy-code-rocks/id1146634772?i=1000611333019
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/4kvwFx913BZZl9Ggroz7W7?si=28e61ce4766647cb
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ommJx6HsS65WwHYIVcLPu?si=6d3e8b96539448ca
- https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/thoughtworks-technology-podcast/id881136697?i=1000631830296
- https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/corecursive-coding-stories/id1330329512?i=1000633456580
-
- worth taking notes on this vid.
Acknowledgements
- Shot to Tyler for helping with this outline so far