LaunchDarkly announced the private preview of Warehouse Native Experimentation, its Snowflake Native App, to offer Data Warehouse Native Experimentation.
While the topic is growing in popularity now, developer experience was not on many people's radars even just a few years ago. One of the simplest, yet most important reasons for the rise of developer experience is that there are just so many more developers in the world. In 2019 alone the number of software developers in the world grew to 23.9 million up from 23 million(link is external) in 2018 and it's predicted to reach 28.7 million by 2024. Between those with a traditional education, developers who got their knowledge from bootcamps or even self taught, the world has more developers but of those developers, now many have influence in purchasing and strategic decision-making that they didn't before.
In fact, in 2022 it was reported(link is external) that 66% of professional developers have at least some influence over their organizations purchases of new technologies. When the same question was asked in a survey from 2020, only 56% of developers had that same power. So as much as developers have evolved in the last decade, it has grown even more in the last two years. As such we are seeing that developer experience is becoming strategically important at the executive level. And as developer experience continues to garner attention for businesses, here are four ways developer experience will improve in 2023.
Onboarding
It's hard to hire technical talent and developers are often one of the most precious resources at a company. Because of that, companies don't have the time to effectively onboard and there is too much time and money wasted in getting new developers up to speed to be productive. So how do we solve the onboarding process?
In the developer community we often hear the phrase "time to first hello world," meaning the first time you run a new program or code, you've built a new language. But something worth considering is switching that terminology to something more like, "time to hello value." Often many organizations will give developers a terminal in a dashboard and then with that they can make an API call, but there is a world in which organizations can ask developers what their stack and use case is and from there give them a code snippet rather than having to start something completely from scratch.
In the next few years, developer experience will get better at onboarding simply because it's one of the only real ways to save the most time and money from the start.
Building
Once we've made it past the onboarding phase, the building process has also had many obstacles. Development often requires bouncing between numerous windows, which is time consuming and takes developers off task. Meaning, if you are looking to code something but you don't remember the exact terminology you should be using in a specific context, you often have to physically click out of what you are looking at and building in order to find the right term. An opportunity where building will continue to get better is when there are more features baked deep into the development environment. Meaning, we are going to see more auto-completes to help within the building process. It's controversial though because auto-completes are often coming from places that people don't know of.
However, regardless of how these platforms are getting auto-completes, the more interesting part is that the solutions aren't trying to move developers to some other context or window. Instead, it's where they are doing the work and the interface is just the keyboard already at their disposal.
Deploying
Beyond onboarding and building, now comes one of the most important steps: deploying. Deploying code to production at one point required the need to run your own servers. Something that was very specific and also complex. Now, and in the years to come, there are many more services that make it much easier to get up and running.
For a long time, if you wanted to get something up on the web you had to be an IT admin. Instead, now companies can allow users to drag and drop, and are thus creating a space for more people to jump and get things on the web in a way that just wasn't possible before. So beyond decreasing time and additional resources, this kind of deployment is democratizing the entire experience. By building out these custom automated routines there are checks in place that enable a developers team.
Maintaining
Lastly, once you have onboarded, built and deployed, there needs to be an opportunity to maintain as to not defeat the entire previous process. Previously and even still, many teams are smaller or made up of individual developers. Whether or not you are a developer part of a larger team or an individual hacker, you may have dependency management problems. Meaning, no one has been there to say if a developer's dependencies are still good.
Developer experience has come a long way, but it also still has so many major opportunities for improvement. In the next year, I expect to see an improvement across onboarding, building, deploying and maintaining. Further improving the lives of developers and the companies they work for.
Industry News
SingleStore announced the launch of SingleStore Flow, a no-code solution designed to greatly simplify data migration and Change Data Capture (CDC).
ActiveState launched its Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaas) offering to help organizations manage open source and accelerate secure software delivery.
Genkit for Node.js is now at version 1.0 and ready for production use.
JFrog signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
mabl launched of two new innovations, mabl Tools for Playwright and mabl GenAI Test Creation, expanding testing capabilities beyond the bounds of traditional QA teams.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced a strategic partnership with leading cloud security provider Wiz to address the growing challenges enterprises face securing hybrid cloud environments.
Jitterbit announced its latest AI-infused capabilities within the Harmony platform, advancing AI from low-code development to natural language processing (NLP).
Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) and Sequoia Holdings announced a strategic partnership to enhance software supply chain security, classified workload deployments, and Kubernetes management for the Department of Defense (DOD), Intelligence Community (IC), and federal civilian agencies.
Harness and Traceable have entered into a definitive merger agreement, creating an advanced AI-native DevSecOps platform.
Endor Labs announced a partnership with GitHub that makes it easier than ever for application security teams and developers to accurately identify and remediate the most serious security vulnerabilities—all without leaving GitHub.
Are you using OpenTelemetry? Are you planning to use it? Click here to take the OpenTelemetry survey(link is external).
GitHub announced a wave of new features and enhancements to GitHub Copilot to streamline coding tasks based on an organization’s specific ways of working.
Mirantis launched k0rdent, an open-source Distributed Container Management Environment (DCME) that provides a single control point for cloud native applications – on-premises, on public clouds, at the edge – on any infrastructure, anywhere.
Hitachi Vantara announced a new co-engineered solution with Cisco designed for Red Hat OpenShift, a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes.