Issue no.7: Building better
The conversation around developer experience has changed.
Hero illustration by Vinnie Neuberg
These days, it isn’t just the efforts of a particular team or a particular set of tools that set engineers up for success—it’s equally about the cross-functional culture, principles, and processes that drive a company as a whole. Whether you’re building dev tools or collaborating with your development team, it’s time to go a level deeper on these dynamics. We brought product builders together in five cities and invited leaders at Atlassian, Linear, and VS Code to break down the methodologies guiding their work.
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The inner loop
Nothing breaks productivity quite like context switching. VS Code offers advice for keeping developers in the flow by protecting heads-down work in the code editor (the “inner loop”) and minimizing how often they toggle into fragmented tasks like tracking bugs, answering tickets, and meeting with collaborators (the “outer loop”).
Developer joy
At Atlassian, the priority isn’t just developer experience—it’s “developer joy,” which focuses on craft and the foundational values that power this philosophy. The team shares how they think about operationalizing joy, measuring business impact, and scaling it to the entire organization.
Opinionated software
The best tools have a point of view—at least according to Linear, where strong beliefs guide the product experience and create default workflows for users. We sat down with one of the company’s co-founders and its CEO to learn when it’s beneficial to go against the grain.
10 lessons on Dev Mode
After a year of using Dev Mode, Decathlon’s Engineering Manager shares 10 best practices for teams looking to align their design and development workflows. Step one? Start small and go for quick wins.
Taming complexity
When it comes to delivering a consistent experience at scale, Crunchyroll—the world’s largest anime streaming service—relies on its Universal Design System. In this conversation, the team reveals how it boosts design system adoption and streamlines handoff in Dev Mode.
Rabbit hole
1. At our Toronto meetup, Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh shared the story of Simple Design System (SDS), a UI kit with a realistic code backing to help bridge the gap between design and development.
2. But as one attendee noted, it’s not just about bridging the gap, but also controlling the quality in an assembly line process that’s not so different from cooking.
3. We had a blast co-hosting our Seattle event with Amazon Web Services, and hope to see you when we team up again for our design systems engineering meetup in Chicago on October 23.
The last word
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