Developer Experience (Algolia)

On today's episode, our hosts Sarah and Bryan are chatting about Documentation with Adam Wathan from Tailwind CSS.  To talk about this today, we invited (for the second time in the show) Adam Wathan, creator of Tailwind CSS. Tailwind is a CSS framework optimized for building custom designs really quickly without having to start totally from scratch.

Documentation is a tremendous topic, especially in tech. We often joke that "people don't read the docs". But when documentation is judged insufficient by the community, you will hear about it. Sarah, Bryan and Adam are going to go over the following questions:

- What makes truly great documentation?
- What is the difference between the bare minimum and exceeding users' expectations?
- How do you account for multiple audiences?
- What is the business risk of having poor documentation?

• Adam Wathan: @adamwathan
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io / sarahdayan.dev
• Bryan Robinson: @brob
• Tailwind CSS: @tailwindcss / tailwindcss.com
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com

On today's episode, Sarah Dayan discusses open source sustainability with Nicholas Zakas, creator of ESLint. ESLint is a widely popular JavaScript linter with a giant ecosystem of third-party plugins. If you have a JavaScript project with a continuous integration, you are certainly using ESLint and you do not want it to fail. Nicholas is also a seasoned author who wrote several books about JavaScript since the early 2000s and more blog posts that you can probably afford to read.

A recurring meme is that all modern digital infrastructure somehow depends on a project that some random person has been thanklessly maintaining for decades. Sustaining open source projects that support countless enterprise products has been a particularly hot topic in tech for the last couple of years.

- How do you actively maintain a project that others rely on but doesn’t bring revenue?
- How do you deal with stress and fatigue?
- Is the promise of open source still holding?

• Nicholas Zakas: @slicknet / humanwhocodes.com
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io / sarahdayan.dev
• ESLint: @geteslint / eslint.org
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com

This episode of Developer Experience is about Developer Education. It’s a wonderful time to become a developer: the demand has never been higher, and there’s a literal ocean of free and paid content to kick start a new career in tech. This firehose of educational content is a side-effect of such a high demand for developers, and it makes it difficult to spot actual quality content that’s worth investing in.

- What makes really great educational tech content?
- How do beginner and advanced developers want to learn today?
- And what does it teach us on communication and reaching clarity?

To answer these questions, Sarah Dayan is joined today by Jason Lengstorf, VP of Developer Experience at Netlify, where he and his team ensure that developers make the most out of the platform. You may also know Jason from his dozens of lessons and workshops on Egghead.io, Frontend Master, and as the host of Learn With Jason, his fantastic developer show where he learns new technologies in 90 minutes with experts from the field.

• Jason Lengstorf: @jlengstorf / jason.af / Learn With Jason
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io / sarahdayan.dev
• Netlify: @geteslint / netlify.com
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com
• "Learning to Learn", article by Sarah Drasner on CSS-Tricks

In this first episode, we dive deeper into what is developer experience with Adam Wathan from Tailwind Labs and Lee Robinson from Vercel. Why did developer experience become so important? Concretely, what does it mean and how do you achieve it? Sarah Dayan chats with our 2 guests to uncover what makes awesome DX, what are the best examples out there, and how they imagine the future.

• Adam Wathan is the creator of Tailwind CSS, one of the most popular and the fastest growing CSS framework, which popularized utility-first CSS. He has since then founded his own company, Tailwind Labs, where he builds the best tools for CSS developers.
• Lee Robinson is the Head of Developer Relations at Vercel, the company behind Next.js, which is rapidly becoming the most popular React-based framework out there. He’s built tons of learning material, including blog posts and courses, and you can always count on his video tutorials to learn how to build anything with Next.

In this episode, we chat with Ben Hong from Netlify about the challenges of providing amazing developer experience for a wide variety of technical stacks. How do you consistently provide incredible DX to everyone when what you build isn't tied to a single platform? How do you properly think of such systems? Ben gives us insights on how the DX team works at Netlify, and how a culture of curiosity and experimentation allows them to stay in touch with the JAMstack community.

Ben Hong is a Staff Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify, one of the most popular serverless platform to build and deploy web apps. He's also very present in the Vue.js community, as a member of the core team and as a Vue Mastery instructor.

• Ben Hong: @bencodezen / bencodezen.io
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io / sarahdayan.dev
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com
• Netlify: @netlify / netlify.com

In this episode, Sarah Dayan chats with not only one, but two guests:
- Sadek Drobi, Founder and CEO at Prismic
- Haroen Viaene, Javascript Library Developer at Algolia

They chat about what it takes for a technical product to blend into other people's codebases. How do you ensure that developers want to put your code in their code? Why is it as important to offer idiomatic integrations as it is to build powerful APIs? Sarah, Sadek and Haroen answer these questions in this third episode of Developer Experience.

Prismic is one of the leading headless CMS solutions, and Sadek was one of the founding architects of the Prismic API. He now leads a growing team who build and maintain a dozen integrations on top of it. Haroen has been working for years on many of Algolia's integrations, and is the craftsmen behind the search experience of Yarn. 

• Sadek Drobi: @Sadache
• Haroen Viaene: @haroenv / haroen.me
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io / sarahdayan.dev
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com
• Prismic: @prismicio / prismic.io

How to nail down the right abstractions for optimal DX? Building abstractions is at the core of API design. They become the face of your software, and they dictate a significant part of its developer experience. How to design the right abstractions? What is the difference between an opinionated software and a failing abstraction?

To answer these difficult questions, we're happy to welcome two remarkable guests:

Tim Neutkens is the Lead Engineer of Next.js, one if not the most popular and versatile React framework. He also co-authored MDX, an authoring format that lets you mix Markdown and JSX.

François Chalifour is a software engineer at Algolia. He's been working on Algolia Instantsearch for several years and co-authored our Recommend UI library. He also completely redesigned Algolia's Autocomplete library from scratch after over a year worth of work and research.

• Tim Neutkens: @timneutkens 
• François Chalifour: @francoischlfr
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com
• Vercel: @vercel / vercel.com

On today's episode, we're going to talk about fostering developer collaboration in a remote world. This is a special edition because Sarah Dayan is joined for the first time by her new co-host Bryan Robinson, Senior Developer Advocate at Algolia. 

Working remotely is not something new, especially in the tech industry, but since the beginning of the pandemic in 2019, there has been a wave of tech workers going remote. First it was by necessity, and then by choice. So how do you collaborate when your coworkers are not in the same room, not in the same city, country or even continent? How did it change our processes and our tools?

Our guest today is Ives Van Hoorne, creator of CodeSandbox. CodeSandbox is the most advanced cloud-based sandbox environment that lets developers quickly start and share prototypes, but also collaborate on projects, provide bug reproductions, and all of that in the browser.

• Ives Van Hoorne: @compuives
• Bryan Robinson: @brob
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io
• CodeSandbox: @codesandbox / codesandbox.io
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com

On today's episode, our hosts Sarah and Bryan are going to talk about the role of community in Developer Experience.

We're all part of communities, whether we participate in them or not.
Are they any major differences between developers centric communities and more traditional ones, centered around geography or interests? We're also seeing more and more developers communities popping up, usually launched by tech companies. What is the value proposition for those developers? How do you take care of a global community, where anything can be happening 24/7?

To help us answers these questions, we're super happy to welcome today our guest Cassidy Williams. Cassidy is Director Experience at Netlify. Outside of that role, Cassidy runs her own community newsletter, is a mechanical keyboard enthusiast and is arguably one of the funniest people on developer social media.

• Cassidy Williams: @cassidoo
• Bryan Robinson: @brob
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io
• Netlify: @netlify / netlify.com
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com

On this episode, our hosts Sarah and Bryan are chatting about accessibility with Kitty Giraudel. Kitty is a front-end developer and accessibility specialist who is currently leading the front-end team at Gorillas. Before this, they have led the front-end team to rebuild the web platform at N26, with a strong focus on accessibility.

We are going to talk about accessibility and its implications when it comes to Developer Experience.

- Can Developer Experience and User Experience cohabitate without hurting each other? Can they help each other out?
- What are the things you want to watch out for in accessibility?
- Are we giving as much attention to accessibility as we are to developer experience?

• Kitty Giraudel: @kittygiraudel
• Sarah Dayan: @frontstuff_io / sarahdayan.dev
• Bryan Robinson: @brob
• Gorillas: @gorillasapp / gorillas.io
• Algolia: @algolia / algolia.com