The Art of Better

What does “better” really mean? If we eliminate duplication, is the code better? If we decide to skip the unit tests, are we doing worse? How do we decide if one design is better than another design?

About 8 years ago, my project failed, despite “doing all the right things”, and shattered my faith in best practices. Since then, I’ve learned to measure developer experience, use data to learn what works, and I’ve been codifying “better” into patterns and decision principles for years. In this talk, I’ll show you the paradigm shift that led to all my discoveries, and hopefully change your perspective on “better”.

“Idea Flow” is an alternative to the Technical Debt metaphor that focuses on problems in human interaction rather than problems inside the code. By measuring the “friction” that occurs when developers interact with the code, we can identify the biggest causes of friction and systematically optimize developer experience.

Why go to all this trouble? From my experience, the biggest causes of pain are seldom what we think. When we try to make things “better”, we can easily miss our biggest problems, or inadvertently make things worse. Visibility turned my beliefs about “better” upside-down.

First, I’ll walk you through the conceptual metaphor of “Idea Flow” and how to recognize friction in developer experience.

Next, we’ll write a little code and record the experience using the open source “Idea Flow Mapping” software.

Finally, we’ll discuss a handful of “decision principles” for optimizing developer experience and analyze our coding experience as a group.