GitHub InFocus: A Closer Look at Developer Experience

Following its first all-virtual GitHub Universe, which drew participants from 174 regions, GitHub is launching InFocus—a global virtual event series for software teams. Rather than a single conference, InFocus spans multiple weeks, each dedicated to a specific theme: developer experience, DevOps, or security. Each week brings new global hosts to guide the conversation.

For the upcoming Developer Experience Week, hosts Martin Woodward, Bassem Asseh, and Faten Healy sat down to explain what the series covers and why developer experience deserves dedicated time.

What Is “Developer Experience”?

Developer experience is a term with multiple meanings depending on context. It might describe how external developers interact with your APIs and tools—or it can describe the internal experience of your own engineers as they build software on your stack.

As Martin Woodward puts it, the internal definition is where many organizations are falling short. "Teams are getting better and better at focusing on the customers and delivering value to them," he says, "but I still talk with lots of companies who are putting friction in their development processes rather than focusing on the developer experience inside their organization."

The goal, he argues, is to reduce that internal friction so value flows faster to customers. That starts with a simple question: when was the last time you asked your engineering teams what slows them down?

From Universe to InFocus: Going Deeper

If you attended Universe's Enterprise track, you’ll recognize some of the ground InFocus covers. But Woodward emphasizes the format difference: "At InFocus we’ll be hearing directly from other teams in companies large and small about how they’re implementing many of the things you heard about at Universe." He compares InFocus to the hallway conversations at a conference—where attendees share what actually worked and what they'd do differently.

Bassem Asseh frames the underlying challenge simply: "Organizations have a pretty simple goal: get better software shipped faster. But many aren’t able to reach it." The missing piece is developer experience. Developers need to stay as close as possible to writing code, rather than getting pulled into peripheral tasks. That could mean leveraging automation through an integrated environment so that attention goes to the most complex work, not repetitive chores.

One of the key Developer Experience Week sessions, Driving Innovation by Building Better Developer Experiences (available in an Asia-Pacific-focused version), builds on the keynote by Erica Brescia, GitHub’s COO. The session covers newer GitHub capabilities including auto-merge pull requests, updates to GitHub Actions, dark mode, and features available in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 like Actions, Packages, code scanning, and secret scanning.

Getting Started Before You Tune In

If you’re new to the concept, Asseh suggests doing some homework before the event. Look at what your developers spend time on. If they’re mostly mired in peripheral tasks instead of writing code, that’s a signal. Security is another angle to examine—ask your developers whether they’re thinking about software security in the code they already write.

You can also review materials from GitHub Universe, including Brescia’s keynote and sessions on how The Home Depot used developer experience practices to modernize its engineering culture.

The Four Pillars of Developer Experience

Faten Healy stresses that developer experience isn’t one thing—it spans four dimensions:

  • Collaboration: Developers thrive in a collaborative environment built around code.
  • Automation: Workflow automation, like GitHub Actions, keeps developers in flow by removing manual steps.
  • Security: Protecting your code also means protecting the supply chain—dependencies pulled from other projects shouldn’t become attack vectors.
  • Reliability: The platform must be scalable, resilient, and available when developers need it.

To improve developer experience and accelerate delivery, organizations need to address all four areas with the right tools and resources.

Developer Experience Week kicks off February 23 at 11am PT / 2pm ET. Full session schedules are available on the InFocus site.