How to improve DevEx in your company

When your mission is to create applications to make the world a nicer place, your developers are the MVP of your organization. Developer Experience (DevEx), then, becomes more prominent when managing your resources, but what is it exactly, and how can you leverage it?

DevEx entails very different factors that, together, can make your dev team’s life easier. These factors range from the purely HR-oriented (work-from-home or hybrid arrangements, a healthy company culture…) to the most technical (number of tools needed to perform a task or quality of the documentation).

Napptive is a ready-to-use Internal Development Platform (IDP) focused on cloud-native application development. And, while it can’t help you with Casual Fridays and pizza parties, it is the tool you need to improve your Developer Experience.

Challenges

In traditional development environments, developers have to face several obstacles in their way to a smooth work experience.

Environment setup

Project onboarding procedures are notably absent in most cases, and when they do exist they rely on time and effort on the project’s developers side to help the new colleague set their environment up properly.

Inconsistent deployment

Deployment inconsistencies are an endless source of frustration. There is nothing worse than spending several hours debugging a piece of code only to realize that you’ve been using the wrong version of one of your tools.

Collaboration issues

If the entry barriers to participate in a project are high and tricky to overcome, collaboration among projects will be scarce, taking more time and energy than what the collaboration itself is worth, or it simply won’t happen.

Enter Napptive’s Internal Developer Platform

Napptive offers you a robust IDP that can help you manage these challenges since it was designed to streamline the design, development, and upkeep of your cloud-native applications. We provide an integrated solution that can be used by any member of your organization including developers and non-technical users to deploy applications in modern infrastructures.

Environment setup

Napptive facilitates the project onboarding process by turning the provisioning hardware procedure into an intuitive and fast task. Setting up an environment becomes immediate, and you can be ready to work in seconds.

Environment creation, one click away

Deployment consistency

The Playground supports the Open Application Model (OAM) by default. You can create a YAML with the deployment definition of your application, ending the deployment inconsistencies you may have had in the past.

Collaboration flow

With its multi-tenant capability, a single cluster infrastructure can serve multiple users with all the security guarantees. This feature enables secure collaboration among teams, fostering innovation.

All this is presented with our amazing UI, which provides a new layer of understanding for modern cloud-native applications. We take pride in our UX department and their fabulous work creating intuitive interfaces to deal with complex tasks in the most efficient way possible.

Key Benefits

With Napptive, a lot of the issues your development team faces on a daily basis will be solved or heavily mitigated. Our Playground enhances the coding experience by solving everything that’s around it and letting it shine on its own.

• Forget about painstakingly setting up new environments or deploying a new version of your application: in our Playground, environment setup and application deployment become immediate tasks. We’ve already seen how easily we can create a customized environment, and deployment is just as intuitive and fast. No more waiting for DevOps to intervene, just click and go.

• Consistency is essential for clear communication. When the team is using the same environments, with the same configuration, and sharing the same tools, there is no room for inconsistencies in the CI/CD pipeline. “It works on my computer” moments have their days numbered.

• Collaboration is easier than ever: the Playground’s security directives ensure that the code is accessible only to the people who are meant to access it, and the application definitions following the Open Application Model provide common ground for coherent deployments. Also, including new people in a project is seamless, fostering synergies between teams.

• Lastly, the Playground can be tailored to different development needs. Your work tools should adapt to you, not the other way around, and that’s why Napptive allows customization of nearly every element in your cluster with no difficulty added (from within the same intuitive interface).

Getting Started

You don’t have to take our word for it: try it today!

You can sign up for free and start using the Playground immediately. Our recommendation to get started is to follow the tutorial in the official documentation and deploy your first cloud-native application from our catalog. It sounds daunting, but that will give you an idea of how easy and intuitive Napptive really is. The Getting Started section has several tutorials available to start working with Kubernetes in this new way, and if you’re more experienced and want to explore what Napptive is really capable of, the Guides section has more advanced tasks for you.

Log in, and have fun!

Conclusion

DevEx is the group of factors that make or break the relationship that you have with your development team. In this day and age, when the job market is more aggressive than ever, keeping talent inside the organization is one of the keys to success, and loyalty can only be achieved by keeping your workers happy. While part of this noble task relies exclusively on HR’s shoulders, the technical side is as important (if not more) and trickier to manage. Napptive can be a game changer for development teams, solving many of the issues they face in their day-to-day tasks, and freeing them from management tasks so they can do what they do best: code.

The original link to the article can be found here: https://napptive.com/blog/how-to-improve-devex-in-your-company/