Shop Talk 639 was a good episode, I specifically enjoyed the discussion of the usability of software for developers. This is everything from how the syntax highlighting works in your editor, to documentation. Laravel improved their DX recently by rolling out php.new after Theo had some issues getting Laravel up and running locally.

DX is also the community surrounding your project. I got into WordPress because of two wonderful women, Andrea and Kim. They offered help and encouragement when I was struggling to learn anything about coding, let alone this new to me WordPress thing.

By the same token, Shop Talk brings up the fact that one crazy person with enough power going off the rails can tank the DX of a project. This is something we’re dealing with in WordPress right now and has me looking for other projects to move my development career out of being dependent on WordPress.

To be clear, I credit WordPress for getting me thus far in my career, but I want to make sure I don’t have to rely on the WordPress name for my future because it’s unstable and untrusted due to the actions of one person.