Developer Experience: what is it , and what are we doing about it at Criteo?
A new article in the Criteo DevXDays series. You can find all the articles about Developer Experience at Criteo here.
If you are part of the developer circles, you probably heard a lot about developer experience in 2022.
But is it really a new thing or just hype? Why should we care? And, by the way, what is it exactly? 🤔
Let’s face the facts: you won’t find one unique definition, but yes, you should care, no, it’s not just hype, and no, it’s certainly not new.
In fact, the topic of Developer Experience (or DevX) has always been important at Criteo, even if the term DevX is quite new. As a company founded by Software Engineers (a.k.a. Developers, a.k.a. Geeks), both technique and development have always been at the center of the company’s culture.
For example, our Voyager Programs allows anyone to temporarily join a different team of the RnD for 2 to 4 weeks to work and deliver a topic with them. Not only does this allow developers to discover a new technology, but it also helps them to understand what their peers work on, their daily routines and strengthen links between members of different teams, maybe even different departments!
DevX is not only about the culture of the company. Just like carpenters will need nails and hammers to build a roof, developers will need tools and workflows to build software. That’s why at Criteo, we have a whole group called the “Factory”. The name speaks for itself: dedicated teams at the service of developers to provide the rest of the R&D the software factory they need to be efficient and deliver world-class products.
But that would be limiting, because DevX is not the concern of just some teams, nor even limited to the RnD and the developers themselves. It’s teamwork, a team effort. It should concern everyone: from HRs to product teams, management to accountancy.
Sounds absurd? Think about it like this: You cannot have a healthy business without a good developer experience.
Still need to be convinced? That leads me to this video talk I present to you today. It was initially made and shared internally for Criteos, for a technical and non technical audience. In it, I will dig into some of the topics we barely scratched above, and even more so that we can try to answer these two questions: What is Developer Experience, and What do we do about it at Criteo? 👇
