That day when DX started to matter to me

| 1 min to read

The day when developer experience (DX) starts matter to me was when I’d to make a meeting to support a developer from another company integrate with my employer.

But, why after that and not before?

Because I never thought DX was thing, probably because I’ve been always a “hacker” and when in front of issues, I’ll dig down and persist to resolve.

I know many developers out there, like to have someone guiding and offer support to deliver something, but I didn’t know the term exists.

The process

The meeting initially was to help debug issues using our internal tools or understanding if there is a bug with our codebase, which in this case was the last option since the API was exaustly tested, but who knows.

After the meeting started, I’d to ask for the language was used to integrate (they’re using python), what is the endpoint and open our tools (e.g. logging monitoring and exception tracker).

Catch some data after some steps with other endpoints and only one endpoint was misbehaving, with that I open the codebase and tried to dig through the code to find some issue or insights about the problem.

I’d found nothing, look at our unit tests and nothing suggests error from our side, then I’d ask to show a code snippet how the developer was calling our API. Since I known a little about python, I’d to start search through the internet, therefore found the issue was with the way the developer is creating the JSON payload to send. Example below:

1import requests
2

3-payload = "{ 'foo': { 'url': 'http://something.lvh.me' } }"
4+payload = { 'foo': { 'url': 'http://something.lvh.me' } }
5
6r = requests.post(
7    'http://localhost:9292',
8    verify = False,
9    json = payload
10)
11

12print(r.status_code)
13print(r.headers)

Note the difference? The way the developer was sending the payload is a string and when our API receives it, was ignoring and doesn’t behaving accordingly. I don’t judge the way to write that code, because in the past, I’d write many times something similar, but sometimes many of us struggle to find the problem.

After the call I’d thinking about it, commented with my CTO and he said “Welcome to devx”.

Lesson learned

Most of the time we’d to care about the developer on the other end, probably writing some code snippets or some guides, besides the API documentation, which in some isn’t enough as this case was.