Long before I was offloading brainpower to Stack Overflow, I sought to offload it for my future self (ahem, and teammates of course). I have a book to thank for this. Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.” It’s a critique of complex user interfaces.
Steve likes them simple and intuitive: the users’ goals are evident and easily accomplished.
Steve’s adage–“don’t make me think”–also plays a fair critique of the code we write. We can take that adage and apply it as a “DX First” approach to writing code. (An approach that admittedly should be sacrificed to UX or Performance Gods as needed.)
In this article I illustrate four high-level ways of elevating the developer experience to the forefront, helping us grok more while thinking less.
