Melvin > Recent Status Updates

Friction is anything that slows down or gets in the way of completing work.

Platform Engineering (standardized infrastructure, tools, and services that developers use as foundation) is an architectural solution that reduces toil and improves cognitive load and feedback loops. DevEx, on the other hand, optimizes the broader development process.

Improving DevEx isn’t about slowing down for comfort—it’s about removing obstacles to acceleration.

DevEx initiatives focus on how seamlessly AI assistance integrates into developers’ day-to-day workflows.

“Developer experience takes a broader view of throughout the entire development lifecycle. It examines everything from onboarding and coding to testing, deploying and monitoring. DevEx initiatives might identify problems that require platform engineering solutions, but they could also address friction points in processes, communication, or team dynamics that no platform could solve.”

Good developer experience isn’t just about making developers happy—it’s about removing friction to accelerate business outcomes.

Improving DevEx is about systematically removing friction so developers can create value. Better tools (e.g., AI) are part of the equation, but so are clearer processes, fast feedback loops, and reduced cognitive load.

AI acceleration shifts the bottleneck from creation to validation. Hence the need to have metrics and data that signal the health of the entire development pipeline to address friction before it undermines the AI investment and derails productivity gains.

DevEx asks “what is it actually like to build and ship software here?” (instead of “how do we build software faster?”)

The answer to this question reveals friction points / opportunities for improvement.

The fundamentals of DevEx are managing cognitive load, optimizing feedback loops, and maintaining flow state.

What is Developer Experience (DevEx)?

DevEx captures the quality of interactions developers have around the tools, processes, and people they work with when trying to get their job done.

DevEx becomes even more critical in the AI era, because while AI accelerates creation, teams still need robust systems to test, deploy, and maintain that code at scale.

Organizations that invest in DevEx will be the ones that move faster, build better, and lead the future.

To succeed in transformations like AI, organizations need to make sure their investments truly enable developers to deliver better software—faster, more reliably, and more securely.

Writing code is not the bottleneck.

Despite the unprecedented velocity in code creation via AI, many organizations find that delivering software to customers is still frustrating and cumbersome.

“Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”

This reminds me of Agile frameworks like Scrum, which state the purpose of all its events and roles. The purposes that emerge from the implementation often differ from the original intent.

Breaking down an emergency department into smaller cross-functional pods had striking benefits (increased throughput). It introduced coordination costs among the pods and ironically introduced/moved inefficiencies in other areas. A local optima vs global optima scenario.

Act as if a decision by itself changes nothing. A decision has no impact unless people agree it’s been made, it is communicated to and accepted by people who have sufficient will, skill, and resources to implement it. In other words, remind yourself and press others to act as if making a decision is the beginning rather than the end of your work.

“No one ever gets credit for problems that never happened.”

Friction Fixing entails understanding what ought to be quick or effortless versus difficult, slow, or downright impossible to do. Why certain things ought to be easy and others hard. How each of us can remove bad friction and inject good friction.

“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.” —Peter Drucker

Push decision down to where the information lives: “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information”.

Whatever sense we have of thinking we know something is a barrier to continued learning.

“Columbus called them Indians, because he miscalculated the size of earth. […] And yet, there is a reason to call them Indians, because they did come, perhaps 25,000 years ago, from Asia […] to Alaska.”

Expectations move slower than reality on the ground.

“Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.” —Carl Richards

Nothing’s free. Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels. The key is figuring out what the price is and being willing to pay it.

“The most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.”