Comment by melvinroest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by melvinroest | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, a previous company I worked at (Triply) highly focused on DX as well. But their characterisation of DX meant that the employees of that company were having an amazing developer experience.

What did that look like?

* Dell XPS with Linux, you also know that everyone else has a Dell XPS and Linux

* An onboarding document to set everything up and it just worked

* Strong focus on using a good IDE/text editor for their TypeScript codebase

* Strong focus on writing TypeScript in such a way that type checking almost always worked

* Well thought out written issues that were self-contained, yet short and to the point

IMO there were a few improvements they could make but you could tell they cared about the developer experience for any programmer working there.

Oh, and if this sounds standard to you / obvious, well, I got news for you. Most companies don't do these type of things ;-)

If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with, it can't be a good DX. Unless their choice is what you'd have chosen anyway.

> If you can't even choose the OS you want to work with

I mean not really. Linux is usually an excellent choice for development and if the rest of the company can use it there's probably no reason you can't other than maybe aesthetic ones. IMO they shouldn't take priority over creating a standard dev environment (you still need all OSes for testing, etc but that's a different point).

The question wasn't if they can use it. The question was if it's a good experience for them.

Yeah, I care about the code that comes into the repository: charset, tab/spaces, style, etc. Who cares about the OS or IDE the developer used to commit or type? Unless you see a productivity/code issues problem...

There is a productivity problem with supporting multiple OSes: either one OS is unsupported (and people who use it waste their time configuring it), or all the tooling, internal documentation and tutorials has to support both - in which case it is often almost double the work.

I have personally seen team members waste days of their time because they tried to adopt an internal script to MacOS, instead of just using Linux VM as recommended.

i'd say a standardized OS and environment for onboarding is a better experience for onboarding so everyone is on the same page. doesn't mean you can't change it to something you prefer though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com