If your business relies on technology to enable your product or if you sell technology then your developers are the engine of your organization. To ensure that your business continues to deliver and scale, it’s imperative that your developers are able to spend as much of their time doing what they were hired to do: develop high-quality business code quickly.

And although this might seem pretty straight forward, it’s often hard for engineering teams to navigate as development work has become more complex and the role of a developer has in many cases become wider to include additional operational responsibilities. It’s not uncommon for a developer to spend less than half of their workday writing business code.

Developer Experience can play an important role with this challenge as its goal is to make development as frictionless and enjoyable as possible so that developers can focus on delivering high-quality code.

To build a strong Developer Experience, I believe there are 7 pillars to follow that will aid your design, decision making and communication.

In this talk I want to present these 7 pillars and illustrate them with initiatives that we have implemented at Booking.com to solve some of our Developer Experience challenges.