Episode Summary

Developer experience is often an afterthought when building APIs. But when you build for developers, DevEx is critical to your success. How fast can you make that time to first call? If you have a high barrier of entry, nobody is going to use it. The easier it is to move quickly, the easier it is to spread the word and drive usage.

Lars and Allen talk about what makes for good and bad developer experiences. They cover real-world examples and what makes them particularly easy (or bad!) to use. Lars dives into the AWS Step Functions DevEx and what he did to finally get rid of that “swivel chair experience.”

About Lars

Lars is the Head of Infrastructure at Mathem.se and AWS Community Builder. He regularly takes it upon himself to make developer experience better for everyone with his open source tools like the Step Functions SDK Autocomplete VSCode extension and EventBridge pattern generator CLI. He’s also the creator of the Step Functions Workflow Studio sync, which aims to address the big gap in usability with the popular AWS service.

Links

• Lars on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Lars’ GitHub
• Step Functions Workflow Studio Sync
• Mathem’s GitHub