Over-abstraction makes tools easier... until no one understands how they work.

We talk about the hidden cost of convenience and why developer intuition still matters.

What happens when no one can explain the system anymore?

https://vpetersson.com/podcast/S02E07.html

The results are in! Check out our latest blog post that reports the findings of the #OpenTelemetry Developer Experience Survey.

Thank you to the 218 participants! Your feedback will help improve #OTel #DevEx in key areas, including the documentation, SDKs, and the Collector.

https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2025/devex-survey/

Team #DevProd or #DevEx? The answer isn’t one or the other. Choose the right developer productivity metrics, & it will lead to improved developer experience in the long run (as well as better products in general). It's a balancing act. https://bit.ly/4kyvieR @TheNewStack

What a friggin wild first quarter I tell you what. As of today lost my boss and his boss so no director of SRE and no VP of TechOps.

I am ... I am in the midst of patterns I have experienced in the past, but in much more high stakes positions. We are under a reorg and I will be honest ... the thing probably saving me from cuts is that I took a low salary. No clue what's to come... except I kinda do have an intuition about it.

I see something happen in the way a CTO handles a shift in power that I have begun to find intuitive because I have witnessed all sides of it so many fucking times. Like I know what they're doing, and I know where they're going next. When things happen, like heads of departments are just gone one day, I have seen this battle before. Ain't my first rodeo, try ain't my tenth.

Hard to tell how things will shake down. Ultimately I think the work we're accomplishing in DevEx is carving out a recognized need that makes my little team's center for excellence work indispensable. I have worked damn hard to forge some bonds there that I could not do elsewhere.

I guess one feeling I have is that I can only go up from here as long as I can hang on. Now that I can get over freaking out about it, I can enjoy the ride instead!

What #devprod metrics matter for Internal #DevEx?
-Environment build time and crash/error rates
-CI/CD pipeline delays
-Time in and length of the inner dev loop
- Time spent waiting for code reviews or other collaboration requests
https://bit.ly/4kyvieR

This website https://viewdns.info/, just like https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ is a good example of nice #devex.

Yes, being technical I should know what "Reverse MX Lookup" means. But it also takes 30 characters and little effort for you to make it so much clearer to me. it

SQS-Admin is now available as native @localstack #extension omitting the necessity to launch additional containers to use #SQS-Admin.
Just integrated, just convenient.
if you like

Repo https://github.com/PacoVK/sqs-admin

#Cursor #IDE doesn't stop to amaze me. I had an old web scraper in #Python. It stopped working because the scraped website changed. I simply prompted that "it no longer finds the right data". No other details. It:
1. Run a few `curl` commands to analyze how the HTML looks now (!)
2. Adjusted CSS selectors (!!)
3. Run the program to figure out if it now works (it did!!!)
4. But Cursor didn't know that, so it added some print statements for himself, re-run and verify the output (!!!!)
#AI #DevEx

The good thing about the new Lambda Console based on VS Code, seems like #AWS is now faster to deliver improvements directly into this IDE.
Latest improvements were

* Cloudwatch Logs live tail in VS Code
* Step Function Workflow Studio integration

No need to leave the IDE

We recently wrote about using AI for software development. Check out the practical ways to level up your workflow.

Article: https://victoronsoftware.com/posts/ai-for-software-developers/

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVdqwcwc2_o
#AI #SoftwareDevelopment #DevEx

SQS-Admin 0.7.0 is out

Highlight is
* the decreased #Docker image size from 20MB to 9MB
* app does no longer run as root

Queue management and interaction with #LocalStack made easy.

Link https://buff.ly/4gCxsHX

Last week was my first time doing a Keynote, and also my first time speaking in almost two years! And it was a special day, since I brought one of my daughters for the first time . What a cool day. We talked about #developerexperience, obviously!

#AWS #CDK roadmap 2025 has been published last week
The focus will be
Further enhancing and expanding L2 constructs lib
Enhance #DevEx - Garbage collection/ stack refactoring/upgrade tool/ generative CDK
Extensible infra - cdk8s/ cdk-tf/ partner integrations

Link:

I’ve put some time into drying to make a short, yet comprehensive, definition of Developer Experience.

https://www.jonas.rs/2025/02/17/defining-developer-experience.html

What do you think?

6 days of writing copy 50% of the time, drawing awful diagrams for the designer to improve and generally hating life marketing is the pits, can’t wait till I can afford someone to make the pretty words, which is a challenge at the pointy end of #gitOps and #devex

My branding agent should arrive soon. She’ll be rocking in the corner after a few more hours of containers and catalogs

As a developer, I'm more passionate about optimizing the way people work together, than the way my coded algorithms work, because the prior lies at the heart of 95% of the problems in delivered software, including poorly performing algorithms. #dev #devex #softwaredevelopment

Beyond the Hype: Building Actually Useful Platforms with the CNCF Maturity Model (and a Healthy Dose of Realism) https://blog.eisele.net/2025/02/cncf-platform-engineering-maturity-model-tvp-guide.html
#PlatformEngineering #DevEx #TVP

SQS-Admin 0.6.2 is out
With updated dependencies, new contributors, and nearly 60,000 downloads.
Queue management and interaction with #LocalStack made easy.

Link https://buff.ly/4gCxsHX

Woohoo progress! So now new service catalogs added to a set of environments by #backstage spawns the machinery and auto wires up some grafana dashboards and the input datasources and scrapers.

Services launched in the catalogs are auto discovered and added to this dash.

(Demo panel, we got some fancy dashboards to run off the same data)