CPH DevX Café

DevX Café is a Copenhagen based community that strives to unite all kinds (X) of creativity and innovation around the craft of developing (Dev) digitale produkter: DevX

A Café - what do you mean?
The term café - in this context - is inspired from the workshop facilitation format World Cafe which - among other things - advocates:

• Smaller groups
• Café style seating and ambience
• Rotation, mingle and cross-table dialogue

Our events will often be limited to just ~25 people and they will probably be so diverse that you may not take intereste in it all, but stay tuned, and feel free to join the discussion forrum and suggest topics, then we will try to set it up.

Is it related to DX - Developer Experience?
Short answer is "yes, it's related" . A more elaborate answer could delve with DX as an emerging phenomena. DX refers to UX - User Experience and CX - Customer Experience. These are disciplines in digital designs that deals with the journey of users and customers.

Developers now stand united and shouts "Hey - what about us!".

The issue being that the workflow (≈journey) offered to most software development teams often sucks; especially in complex situations such as large bureaucratic organisations, when there is hardware-in-the-loop, purely cost-driven projects, tight unrealistic deadlines, regulated environments or just poor leadership and organization.

There is a huge benefit in optimizing the workflow for DX - making developer's lives easier!

✔︎ Developer Experience is definitely an interest for this CPH DevX Café meetup group.

Is this related to DevOps?
Short answer is "yes, it's related". DevOps is a movement of it's own. It kickstarted in 2008 on the back of agile and lean ideas and concepts. Inspired by lean principles DevOps strives for continuous improvement, continuous delivery, continuous integration to create a continuous one-piece-flow of software with quality built in - as opposed to glued on.

The DevOps name refers to one of the first issues addressed by this movement; The fact that developers (Dev) and IT operation (Ops) should stop fighting each other like a trench war, but rather they should join forces: Ops were then invited into the development teams as 1st class citizens. Lending on the core agile principles on team optimization.

✔︎ DevOps is definitely an interest for this CPH DevX Café meetup group.

DevX - What's in a name?
There are quite a few different - widely used - abbreviations for Developer Experience: DX, DevEx, *DevX *are all in play. But clearly DX is the most commonly used variant - so why do we use DevX then?

Well to deliberately and consciously embrace the double meaning that it's not just Ops that should become 1st class citizens in the teams - but X - meaning everyone involved in the value stream.

At the same time we do find that Developer Experience and the continuous catering to improve the work lives of all developers - whatever their domain of expertise is - one of the most important trends in software these days.

Who's included in the X - everyone?
Short answer is "pretty much, yeah!". A more detailed answer could argue that; In entrepreneurship there is a clear tendency that more and more products take off-set in something digital, meaning that the product being developed is software. It has created a huge demand for software developers . All over the world, everyone is shouting “we need to educated more programmers".

But at the same time new improved technologies, languages, platforms, tools and services are popping up like mushrooms in the forest after a good rain fall. A lot of these are deliciously easy accessible as low-code or no-code tools. At the same time generative AI is spreading even faster, with the consequence that even for very complex challenges a few hours of prompt engineering can take a focused wannabe with tech flair quite far.

So a relevant question sounds; "Is there perhaps another solution to the scarcity of programmers?"

What if some some of these creative tech savvy entrepreneurs could help themselves and just get cracking at it.

Citizen development
It's a well-debated challenge in software development that domain knowledge in the specific field that the software should work is equally important as the software development skills themselves.

So one could ask; "should we train the software developers in the relevant business domain, or should we train people with prior business domain knowledge to build software?"

There are a convincing amount of surveys pointing to the trend, that a lot of the future software will be develop by Citizen Developers. A term used exactly to describe individuals with a different - primary - subject matter expertise than programming, but who uses no-code, low-code and generative AI to to develop digital products - within their primary knowledge domain.

Citizen Developers and the weapons they take to battle are definitely included in the X in DevX - they too are hereby invited into the development team as 1st class citizens.

✔︎ Citizen Development is definitely an interest for this CPH DevX Café meetup group.
✔︎ No-code and Low-code are definitely interests for this CPH DevX Café meetup group.
✔︎ Prompt Engineering with Generative AI is definitely an interest for this CPH DevX Café meetup group.

Software Is Eating the World
...Even the world of software!