Designing a Developer Experience - For Stream Processing
Bytewax's "Developer Guides" teach developers stream processing by walking them through short and fun exercises. When I saw these guides, the experience absolutely blew me away. So I invited Zander, the founder and CEO of Bytewax, and Oli, the head of devrel at Bytewax to share their secrets with all our SaaS developers. We talked about guiding engineers, what's truly hard about stream processing (not what you think!), cool hacks, and how Bytewax is building better experiences with their community.
The guides that started the conversation: https://bytewax.io/guides
GitHub repo: https://github.com/bytewax/bytewax
Bytewax community slack: https://join.slack.com/t/bytewaxcommu...
SaaS Developer community slack: https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas
Inspirations for Bytewax guides:
Stripe API docs: https://stripe.com/docs/checkout/quic...
Confluent tutorials: https://developer.confluent.io/tutori...
Spring Guides: https://spring.io/guides#getting-star...
Konrad, a Bytewax engineer, did a great job developing our guides based on these inspirations.
Bytewax hack days & community:
Federico, a Bytewax engineer, made a cool visualization using Rerun and Bytewax: https://github.com/rerun-io/rerun
Dan, Bytewax VP of eng, used this library for his StarCraft project: https://github.com/BurnySc2/python-sc2
Mikko, a Bytewax community member, built an index to use with Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer questions about Bytewax documentation and Python API: https://github.com/Softlandia-Ltd/byt...
00:00- introductions
02:35 - Why did ByteWax invest in developer guides?
6:57 - What are developers looking for?
9:30 - The parts Oli is most proud of
10:50 - Is stream processing really that easy?
12:45 - What do developers struggle with the most?
16:15 - From Scala to Python
18:20 - What's surprisingly difficult?
22:15 - How to pick good examples for the guides
25:25 - Cool Bytewax hacks
28:50 - Inspiring developer experiences
32:45 - Product, documentation and community
36:56 - Story from the community
38:25 - Tips for great developer experience