DX: why developers should care about the tools they use

About at the same time when Conway was coining his now famous law, Marshall McLuhan warned us that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”.

IDEs are supposed to be the tools software engineers use. Yet, most IDEs are primarily focused on the active part of writing code, while developers actually spend most of their time understanding systems. Assessing software systems is perceived as rather secondary and mostly supported in the small. The IDE is not as integrated as it could or should be.

We have to rethink the developer experience because software is immaterial and the tools we use are the only way through which we experience software. The tools we use matter.

In this talk, we take a systematic look at how a developer experience could look like and what an environment for developers should be made of. We exemplify the message with live demos of the Glamorous Toolkit (http://gtoolkit.org), a project aiming to reinvent the IDE.

Developers are developers. But, developers are also users. And like any users, they need appropriate tools that match and augment their abilities, too.

IDEs are supposed to do just that. They are supposed to bring together into one coherent interface all tools related to development. This is what “I” stands for.

But, let’s look at it: all IDEs I know have in forefront the text editor. And there are some powerful editors out there. Those editors are particularly good at creating code, but are terrible at understanding code. Why terrible? Well, imagine having to optimize the traffic in a city, and only be given a magnifier glass as a tool. The editor is exactly that: a magnifier that shows with great details every line of code. Clearly, the design of the IDE does not favor the big picture.

And that’s not all. Let’s look at search: how do you search for concrete annotations in your IDE, such as quickly finding all Java methods annotated with @Interesting(“with specifics”) that also match a name pattern? Given that annotations are more and more pervasive, should it not follow that the IDE makes it possible to quickly find them without involving regex file search? Or let’s consider inspecting objects: when you inspect a map object, why do you see a tree? Should it not be more appropriate to see a table instead? Should the IDE not make it possible to offer presentations that are better suited based on the context at hand? And why are pictures not pervasive in our world?

These are just some examples. The “I” is not that integrated. We can do better. We have to do better. We have to put the developer experience in the forefront.

Designing an interface starts from understanding the needs. In this talk, we take a systematic look at how a developer experience could look like and what an environment for developers could be made of. We exemplify the message with live demos of the Glamorous Toolkit (http://gtoolkit.org), a project aiming to reinvent the IDE.

About Tudor Gîrba

Tudor Gîrba (tudorgirba.com) is a software environmentalist and co-founder of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team on the Glamorous Toolkit, a novel IDE that reshapes the Development eXperience (gtoolkit.com).

He built all sorts of projects like the Moose platform for software and data analysis (moosetechnology.org), and he authored a couple of methods like humane assessment (humane-assessment.com). In 2014, he also won the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his research (aito.org). This was a surprising prize as he is the only recipient that was not a university professor, even if he does hold a PhD from the University of Bern from a previous life.

These days he likes to talk about moldable development. If you want to see how much he likes that, just ask him if moldable development can fundamentally change how we approach software development.

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