Developer Experience

[Luke Macken]

On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 10:13 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> I've been to and heard reports about what I think of, maybe
> unintentionally tritely, as downstream developer events, where Fedora
> is not in as wide a use as I think we'd like, including PyCon and
> RubyCon.  These are folks who use open source frameworks and languages
> to do their work but are most concerned about an effective developer
> platform, not the OS itself.  They might be designing, say, the next
> Facebook, and it would be great if Fedora was their choice for doing
> that.  (Right now, their choice is probably a Mac based on what I've
> seen at these conferences.)

Yeah, Fedora was definitely scarce at PyCon this year, and the only
shadowman I saw was on the back of some random guys conference shirt.
It seems that the majority of the Python community prefers doing their
development on the Mac in virtualenvs, and most seem to deploy on CentOS
& Ubuntu LTS.

Dave Malcolm gave a great lightning talk at PyCon this year and showed
off the new Python gdb debugging features in F13, and impressed a lot of
people.  I think doing great work like this on our core development
tools will help us gain mindshare in these language communities.

> We actually have a few people in Fedora who are examples of this --
> such as Luke Macken, who develops Moksha[1].  I think Luke currently
> uses vim, but it might be worthwhile to find out what sorts of
> features would appeal to a developer like him.

As far as development apps go, I could do my job at runlevel 3 with vim,
git, and python.

I don't think that there will ever be a one-size-fits-all solution for
developers.  Everyone has got their own custom environment that they are
comfortable in, however, I think we can still put effort into
solidifying the story of each of these language development
environments.

Take a look at what a developer has to go through to setup their
environment after a fresh install.  Ok, I want to install an IDE and a
some library/framework.  Fire up PackageKit, click Programming, and you
get an INSANE LIST OF PACKAGES.  I think we could really improve this
situation by having a list of per-language/framework groups that can
easily be installed (eg: Python development, Ruby on Rails development,
etc).  We kind of have this with `yum grouplist`, but it's far from
ideal.

I also think most developers want their desktop to just get out of the
way so they can focus on their application.  Productivity is key, and
thus having a great suite of productivity apps is a win.  I personally
use vim-vimoutliner, but we have a lot of other great tools like gtg,
hamster-applet, gnote, that we should be encouraging developers to
checkout.

Earlier, Dave mentioned "good integration with EC2", which sounds
interesting.  Not only making it easy to develop/run/debug your
application locally, but making it easy to seamlessly deploy it to a
cloud.

Didn't we used to have a Developer Spin?  Even if that got revived, how
can we provide a better development experience aside from just
installing a bunch of packages?

luke