As users of applications, we are very critical when it comes to our experience. Quick to dismiss and abandon products at the slightest irritation: a delayed response, an unexpected behavior, an unresponsive button, a distasteful design.

But as developers, we often resign ourselves to the ordinary pains and discomfort of our daily codebase. Long build time, flaky tests, mysterious black boxes of legacy code, endless debates about inconsequential choices, unhelpful review process… Those are all bad experiences. Those are all preventable, fixable. Developers are the users of their codebase.

Why should we not strive to make this user experience as delightful as possible, for everyone involved?

I am a career switcher. Four years ago, I was a film archivist and digital project manager, but I wanted to *make* things, not *manage* things. Since then I worked at two start-ups in Brussels and Berlin, and strived to improve not only the product but the process of making it.