swyx Profile picture
28 Aug, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Most people know the 4 key metrics of Dev Ops:

- Delivery lead time
- Deployment frequency
- Mean time to restore service
- Change fail rate

What would the 4 key metrics of Dev Experience be?
my picks:

🌏 Time to World Tour

Anyone can do "Hello World" with `git clone` and not teach a thing. More impt to give the developer a useful mental model of what they should know in short time.

You can't visit all 192 countries, but you can show that there are 7 continents.
🏃‍♀️ Time to Implement Change

Anyone can build brittle systems. But great DX optimizes for 1-2 standard deviation changes in requirements:

- find helpful docs fast (better: no docs needed)
- low edit distance
- smooth migration paths

👀 Time to Preview Change

Anyone can do a 15 min redeploy to see results of a change. Great DX reduces that 1-3 orders of magnitude:

- Fast local preview of changes (eg HMR or good tests)
- Cached rerun of results (eg @observablehq)
- Instantly deployable changes (eg @Replit)
❗ Total WTFs per Year

Anyone can design for the happy path. Great DX handles not only the good, but also the bad AND the ugly:

- Errors that don't make me think
- Billing that is predictable and boring
- Proactive warning of known issues

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More from @swyx

11 Sep
Never thought I would see a frontend eng team celebrate shipping a static marketing site with 847kb of JS.

Until I saw what it used to be…

notion.so/blog/migrating…
I'm no perf expert or perf shamer (let he who is without sin...)

But here's what I do believe:

1. local Lighthouse runs are not credible. Use webpagetest or web.dev/measure.

2. you do NOT have to use the same tech for app and site! :)
in fact i’m -so- not a perfshamer I shall now say the thing I’m not supposed to say:

before today you didnt know or care that Notion had a 9.1MB JS marketing site; if it impacted them enough they would’ve fixed it sooner; you may have a fast site but they have 10 million users.
Read 4 tweets
1 Jul
"Broccoli positions": Opinions that may be good for you, but make the person extremely unpopular/exposes them to looking stupid.

Diametric opposite of @shreyas' Apple pie positions.

Some I've seen, no particular order:
"No amount of hiring will help us."

"This isn't good enough. Ship it."

Better than never-shipping perfection.

The more stakeholders, the better you get at not-shipping.

Make sure to build in the feedback loop or you won't know what's embarrassing.
Read 9 tweets
22 Apr
I'm turning 35 today! 🎉

As I grow older, I'm realizing the value of principles to make decisions and guide behavior. What are yours?

Here's 35 of mine:
This is a thread of 35 Principles from my 35 years, but a full writeup of these will be available on my blog: swyx.io/35-principles/

and discussed on newsletter ✉️ (good reads every week!)
1. Life is Too Short for Short Term Games

We only have so many years for long term games to compound. Make 'em count.

Read 38 tweets
14 Mar
🆕 The Part Time Creator Manifesto

swyx.io/part-time-crea…

There's a lot of "quit your job, indie hack your way to freedom" on social media.

I like my job. But I want to make too. There has to be a middle way.

Quick thread 👇
Creation is about more than just money.

It's about self sufficiency. Self actualization. Playing long term games. Collecting optionality.

It's about having a job while not *BEING* your job. Making $100k a year has alw...
I don't WANT to go full-time now, but I *could*. And I'm putting in the reps before I need to.

Because I don't derive all my self worth from my employer, I stand a little taller. Dream a little bigger. Negotiate a little harder.

It's a powerful feeling.
Read 6 tweets
6 Mar
A common question I get:

Is #LearnInPublic suitable for everyone?
What if I look dumb?

My answers below, but I'd love to hear yours too!

(DM shared w/ permission) Hi, Shawn 👋! My name is Choong Kyu and I've been wonderin
1/ Learning in Public is *not* “broadcasting everything”. Nobody wants that.

It is about realizing you have a choice to go from 0% to not-0% public. The stuff you do share, you will learn faster, while building a network. It’s up to you to set the boundaries of what you share.
2/ Understanding how to turn your ignorance into power is a key career skill. If you want to grow at all you must make ignorance an old friend, and make friends out of ignorance.

Lean into the discomfort. Become a professional (but responsible) ignoramus
Read 4 tweets
4 Mar
In the past week alone, I've had multiple chats with startups looking for developers who can build community.

I think this is a generational shift in how devtools startups approach their users

quick thread on why **Technical Community Builder is the hottest new job in Tech**👇 picture showing how communi...how community helps startup...Community is many-to-many. ...just a dumb community meme ...
Devs have always self organized community, but in the past couple decades companies arose where the dev community is **the competitive moat**:

- @StackOverflow serves 11m community Q&A's a day
- @github sells collaboration software to 56m devs
- Hacker News has >4m daily readers
If community can be such an advantage, who's in charge of community at startups?

Often the answer is: community managers handle forums, developer evangelists do outreach, marketing handles and events and mailing list.

Can we do better? How to take risks & break down silos?
Read 22 tweets

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