Experiences developing tools for developers (invited talk)

Abstract

Software Engineers are horrible customers for software tools. If they don't like your tools, they will just write their own. If your tool wastes a few minutes of a developer's day, good luck getting them to ever try your tool again. And if, after years of effort, you manage to develop tools they actually like, you are really in trouble. This is when they start building systems on top of your tools. No API? No problem! They will hack and scrape as needed to get their job done. In this talk I'll go through a number of examples of successes, non-successes and over-successes from the past 8 years of evolving the developer infrastructure at Google. I'll highlight the challenges we faced, our attempts to address the challenges and share our lessons learned.