Developer experience is measured in minutes to first deploy
Stackwell cut the median time from sign-up to a working deploy from twenty-six minutes to four. Jonah Adeyemi on the measurement, eleven rewrites and the fixes that were not in the docs.
- Wednesday 9 June
- Day 1
- 16:30–17:10
- 40 minutes
- Studio
- First floor, river side
- Talk
- Intermediate
Developer experience is easy to talk about and hard to measure. At Stackwell the team settled on one number: the median time from creating an account to having an app running at a public address. In early 2025 it was twenty-six minutes, and more than a third of new users never got there at all.
Jonah walks through how the team instrumented that journey, step by step, and what the data showed. Some of the fixes were in the documentation, which he rewrote eleven times. More of them were not: an error message that blamed the user for a network timeout, a command-line prompt that asked a question nobody could answer yet, and a sample app that took four minutes to install its dependencies.
The median is now four minutes. The talk covers every change that mattered, the ones that did nothing, and how to set up the same measurement for your own product in a week.
What you will take away
- How to instrument the path from sign-up to first success without slowing it down
- The kinds of friction that documentation alone cannot fix
- A cheap, repeatable way to watch new developers use your product
