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The many spellings of Developer Experience

Lets get started on DevX.. or DevEx?

Toni Menzel

Mar 11, 2023

I am honest here. This post was supposed to be called “What is Developer Experience”.. but it just seemed to be too much of a first post for someone like me: I just have 123 drafts of a post for this in my craft.do account, they never got finished

Writing this first post on a sunny Saturday morning in our new home. We even got a lot of fresh snow tonight.

Therefor I will hack myself: let’s write the first posts to answer one question at a time.

Today: What are the commonly used spellings, what is most common and what do I prefer?

To my knowledge there are the following main variants to name the same thing:

DevX
DevEx
DX

These are all, to me, referring to Developer Experience.

If you ask Chat-GPT (yes, need to do this these days) you get this answer:

According to Chat-GPT these are other variants, all of them I think are irrelevant, but it seems people use these:

DevExp
DevExpX
DevXp
DevXperience

So, when starting with writing, I should personally stick to one version right?

And I must say I really don’t like “DX” because it makes the already not really well known Term harder to understand. It is just too compact and could mean too many things.

Instead, the one that I commonly use and really like the most is DevX.

It is very short, has an emphasis on developer and is all in all a catchy term, even when written without capitalisation (devx).

Hope this clarifies the confusion, without having defined Developer Experience itself yet. This is the topic of the next post.

Following posts will answer questions like this:

What is Developer Experience really?
What is the difference of Developer Experience and Developer Ergonomics?
Should only developers care about this?
Why does Developer Experience matter for Project Stakeholders?
How to improve Developer Experience?
What is more important: Hiring more rock-star developers or improving developer experience?
Examples of Developer Experience that suck
What are the Top Developer Experience Podcasts?

At the end I hopefully will have some interested readers to start the conversation.

Feel free to subscribe to this (very new) substack!

All the best,

Toni from the Couch on a snowy Saturday morning in March 2023.