Developer Experience

Getting started with new technologies is usually a huge pain. Often I stumble around for hours trying to get an app’s toolchain setup correctly. Instructions are usually like:

Things get worse when I lead workshops for hundreds of enterprise developers where many are on Windows machines and not very comfortable with cmd.exe.

Experiencing this pain over-and-over is what led me to create Typesafe Activator as a smooth way to get started with Play Framework, Akka, and Scala. Developers have been thrilled with how easy taking their first step with Activator is but I never finished polishing the experience of the second step: App Deployment.