Friday, June 21, 2013

White House API Standards, DX and UX

The White House recently published some standards for developing web APIs. While going through the documentation, I came across a new term - DX. DX stands for developer experience. As anybody would understand, providing a good developer experience is the key to the success of a web API. Developers love to program with clean, intuitive APIs. On the other hand clunky, non-intuitive APIs are difficult to program with and usually are full of nasty surprises that make the developer's life hard. Therefore DX is perhaps the single most important factor when it comes to differentiating a good API from a not-so-good API.
The term DX reminds me of another similar term - UX. As you would guess UX stands for user experience. A few years ago UX was one of the most exciting topics in the IT industry. For a moment there everybody was talking and writing about UX and how websites and applications should be developed with UX best practices in mind. It seems with the rise of the web APIs, cloud and mobile apps, DX is starting to generate a similar buzz. In fact I think for a wide range of application development, PaaS, web and middleware products DX would be way more important than UX. Stephen O'Grady was so right. Developers are the new kingmakers