DEV Community: Ben Link

What Awnings Taught Me About Developer Experience

Ben Link — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:15:00 +0000

Here in the U.S. we have a fast-food chain called Chick-fil-A. Its claim to fame isn't actually its food (though it's quite tasty!), but its commitment to the perfect customer experience. And whatever they're doing, it's working - most of their locations have incredibly long (but also extremely fast-moving) lines.

At the one nearest to my house, I noticed something interesting: an awning was built over a section of the drive-through line. This wasn't just some canvas cover; it's a full metal roof. It even has fans and heater units installed... for people to drive their cars through. It's not something cheap - it's clearly an investment.

The Origin of the Awning

In a traditional fast-food joint there's a sign in the back with a speaker unit that you can drive up to, place your order, and then drive around to the side of the building where they'll open a window and hand you your food.

But at Chick-fil-A, the lines were so long that they were losing customers. So they created an operations technique they call the "Outside Play". The Outside Play sends a couple of employees with tablet PCs out to stand in the line of cars and take orders. This allows the kitchen to prepare more orders in advance, reducing the time that a customer has to spend waiting at the window. Throughput can increase dramatically by putting those two employees out there.

An Unexpected Problem

The Outside Play works flawlessly, except for one thing: The Weather. If it's raining, the tablets might not work. If it's really hot or cold outside, it isn't safe for the employees to stay out there for extended periods.

At first, they tried just rotating people in and out, and it worked for a while. But where I live, our summers get disgustingly hot and humid... even with short outside shifts, like 20 minutes a pop, employees were still in danger of suffering from heat exhaustion.

The Awning Solution

Chick-fil-A leadership realized they needed those people out there. So they elected to invest - and built the awning. And they put the fans in it for the summertime, and they put heater units in it for the wintertime, and they put quality work into it so that their employees can still keep the Outside Play running regardless of the weather.

Sir, this isn't a Wendy's... it's a Technology Blog

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with technology... but let's talk about Developer Experience. If your company's leadership didn't grow up around the concept of DevEx, they probably wave the "ROI" flag at you any time you suggest initiatives to focus on improving things.

"That's just frivolity. We need to work on increasing revenues, or on cutting costs."

That sounds like:

"We don't need metal-roof buildings, heaters, or fans. We need more chicken nuggets out the window."

Chick-fil-A realizes that the awning isn't a perk; it's a throughput multiplier.

Without it:

The Outside Play shuts down in bad weather.
Order velocity drops.
Lines grow longer.
Revenue leaks.

With it:

The system works every day.
Employees can operate safely.
Throughput remains high.
Revenue increases.

Their investment protects the system that makes money.

Now think about that with some DevEx words replacing the chicken nuggets:

Without good DevEx:

Builds fail randomly.
Local environments are inconsistent.
Onboarding takes months.
Engineers context-switch constantly.
The “Outside Play” shuts down when conditions are bad.

With good DevEx:

Engineers stay in flow.
Deployments happen safely and quickly.
Bugs surface earlier.
Throughput increases.

The awning doesn’t make employees happier for happiness’ sake... Its purpose is to keep the system producing. And for your business, Developer Experience is the awning that keeps your delivery pipeline running.

The Leader's Challenge

If you're a leader who's asking for ROI when your engineering team asks for some Developer Experience improvements, ask yourself instead: "What's going to happen to your throughput when the weather gets bad?"

"Bad Weather" in a Software Engineering context can strike in a lot of different ways:

A surprise price hike from a core services vendor. (Copilot token billing, anyone?)
A major security vulnerability exposed in your supply chain. (Can't wait for Mythos!!!!)
An urgent business need to deliver something before a competitor does.

You can keep rotating engineers...

Or you can build an awning.

What if Everybody Were Suddenly... Better?

Ben Link — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:05:00 +0000

We (and by we I often mean 'me' 🙃) spend LOTS of time talking about how to improve our work. LinkedIn-fluencers (even the crappy AI-bot ones) talk about optimizing and improving and making things better all the time. It's great to have goals like this: self-improvement is admirable, and I fully believe that the best people at any given task (software engineering, plumbing, music, you name it) are the ones who are always working to improve what they do.

To absolutely no one's surprise, though, we don't often see the organizational improvements we advocate for (or maybe some of us are surprised by this? idk, let me know in the comments!). Working with people is a messy business: sometimes they're politically or financially incentivized to follow "The Old Way", and no amount of logic will change their minds. Sometimes we do a crappy job of stating our case and they don't understand the change we want to make. Sometimes "this is suboptimal, but I don't have to put in additional effort" wins out over a better idea that requires a little sweat equity. We might give the needle a small nudge, but often we put in a lot of effort and glean relatively little progress from it. It can be maddening at times.

Fever Dream Fantasy: The Thought Experiment

There's an amazing dude named John Cutler over at DotWork who, at the end of 2025, proposed a really intriguing thought experiment. As I'm drafting this almost two full months later, I've had some time to think about what he suggested for a while now...

Here's a link to his original post, but if for some reason LinkedIn decides to eat that, I've copied the text below for posterity:

Here’s a fun little thought exercise. Suddenly everyone in your company is 30% more capable, more competent, more skilled, more experienced.

What would actually happen?

That kind of outcome feels too good to be true. (Which is probably why it's a thought experiment!) I mean, imagine showing up on Monday morning and EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE COMPANY is leveled up like that! Wouldn't it be great? We'd be SO profitable and SO efficient and we'd absolutely CRUSH it every day, wouldn't we?

...wouldn't we?

The Answer Lies in What DIDN'T Improve

Our 30% improvements were in:

Capability
Competency
Skill
Experience

But think about what isn't in that list:

Incentives
Priorities
Decision-making latency
Trust levels
Clarity of ownership
How work flows
How conflict is handled
How failure is punished

Oh, sure, you've increased the Talent. But you've left them in a broken system. Think about it like this: your engineer is 30% better at shipping things, but if you still have problems with prioritization, they're shipping the wrong thing 30% faster.

Did you really gain anything by that?

What if your approval process takes weeks, or even months? Making the engineers work faster doesn't really help. (BTW: This is a concept codified forty years ago, called the Theory of Constraints. Nothing new!)

What if your team struggles with psychological safety? Even if you increase their skill overnight... they're still not going to contribute more when it isn't safe to speak up.

Leadership Always Falls for The "Get Better People" Trap

Listen to senior leadership discussions, and you'll realize that many (most? maybe all?) have fallen for it:

"I only want A players on my team."
"We need more Senior/Staff/Principal Engineers."
"We need higher standards in the organization."
"We're going to outsource {some competency} because it will be more efficient than investing in our teams developing the skill."

It's tantalizing to think this way:

"Oh, well Bob isn't working out for us - he's competent, but he's just too slow. Let's cut him and hire one of those 10x guys I keep hearing about."

This kind of thinking feels natural to us. If you grew up playing TECMO Bowl, you remember Bo Jackson. He was that 10x Running Back that you and your siblings always fought over - because whoever had him was going to win.

On the surface, managers and directors think like this because it feels like meritocracy. "We gave Bob a chance, he couldn't hack it here." It's tangible - something they can see and do, so they feel like they're hands-on "managing" their team. But I think they're actively destroying their team by doing this.

Wanna know why?

The revolving door "Bob couldn't hack it" approach is easier than doing the culture work that fixes what actually kept Bob from succeeding.
Bob gets the blame that rightly belongs to the leadership system... and every other engineer sees that management will cut people instead of admitting a fault.

Here are some "translations" you might want to consider:

Easy Story	Hard Reality
We need A-players.	Our environment suppresses B+ players instead of helping them grow.
We need more Seniors.	Our decision process is chaotic.
We need higher hiring standards.	We don't protect focus, or prioritize well, or communicate well.

For Senior Leadership, it can be psychologically safer to blame their people than to honestly assess the management system.

Environment Shapes Your Team's Productivity

If you've ever read anything on the Adventures of Blink, you know I firmly believe that good Developer Experience is the foundation of your engineering team's ability to increase revenue... but judging from what I observe around me, there aren't many in senior leadership roles who've made that connection.

Let's consider it like a simple equation:

Impact = Talent × Environment

So if everyone were 30% more talented, 1.3x talent seems pretty exciting, doesn't it?

Set your environment to 0.5, and even your extra-talented team underdelivers.

Now let's look at it a different way: If you provide a great environment, even your average talent looks incredible!

Why we can trust the equation

Blink, you just made that formula up. Well... you're right about that... but I think it works anyway! Here's why:

Clear priorities → Fewer wasted cycles

Strong trust → Faster decisions

Tight feedback loops → Rapid improvement

Psychological safety → Better idea-sharing

Good DevEx → Skill converts to output

Providing a safe, empowering, collaborative environment clearly acts as a force multiplier across all these dimensions.

The Right Questions

The easy question for leadership is "How do we get better people?" It's an alluring question because people in management fantasize that the answer is found in hiring practices, in clever interview questions, in asserting themselves as "high-performance leaders" who go and get things done.

But the right question to ask looks a little different:

What would need to change for our current people to operate at 130%?

That's a tough pill to swallow because it reframes the responsibility.

In order to answer that question, you can start by looking for the answers to these:

Where do good ideas go to die?

You might actually have lots of great ideas coming from your staff... but they get strangled before they're realized. Find out why that is, and fix it.

Where does energy leak?

I've watched a highly motivated team absolutely burn out because they spent as much time fighting the system as they did innovating.

Where does friction accumulate?

You didn't wake up one morning and say "hey let's implement a painful cumbersome process" (well, at least I hope you didn't!). It's been compounding in the shadows for a while. Ask the team where it is, and listen carefully. They'll show you.

What behaviors are we quietly (and/or accidentally) rewarding?

I once knew a manager who obsessed over his team's compliance scores. If a finding came out for his team, he insisted on dropping ALL planned work to deal with it.

Governance and Compliance learned that if they needed something from him, they could rattle the Findings saber and instantly move to the front of the line.

His team learned that their innovation wasn't as important as their Compliance scores.

Think about how that affected everyone's choices.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but...

If 30% more capable people wouldn’t radically transform your company, that’s not a talent problem; it’s a system problem.

The fantasy is that better people will fix the system.
The reality is that the system shapes what people can become.

Wrapping Up

I get it: managers want to manager. They see a quick path to "fixing the problems" and it tempts them with their own agency:

"You can fix this broken team, just get rid of the low performers and get some rockstars in there".

I've felt like that before. And it's hard to tell the difference between a B+ player who's been hamstrung by a bad environment and a C- player that's genuinely a bad fit. All I'm saying is that maybe we need that trigger-finger to be a little less itchy, and apply a little introspection first.

Requiem for a Species: How AI Destroys Humanity

Ben Link — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:10:00 +0000

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay... or so say all the "Influencers" in every tech space on every platform. Since about the middle of 2023, we've been permanently "6 months away from AI completely taking over software engineering!"

Oh, don't get me wrong, LLMs and MCPs and Agents and OpenClaws (and all the new family of buzzwords) have made tremendous strides... and it truly is exciting to see the latest manner in which we've tricked rocks into thinking for us.

But y'all... I gotta say, I'm a little worried about the trajectory we've established. I think it's time we have a talk.

First, let's talk about... everything else

In 1969, the US Department of Defense made a connection between a few key computers called ARPANET. It was created out of fear of a nuclear strike - if the Soviets bombed our research facility, everything we were working on would be lost! We need to protect that research, so we created an easy way to transmit the data to another location. Then in the 1990s, we saw a "worldwide web" built on ARPANET's technology and learning. For a few years, the web was a place of people exploring and building and learning together and sharing. But the infrastructure was expensive.

And then came the advertisers. Somebody got the bright idea to make some money by selling advertising space on their web page. Then someone else figured out how to make an ad "pop up" in a new window when you visited their page. The entire internet became a hellscape of windows popping over (and under) the page you wanted to view... sometimes multiple ads for a single content page. If you lived through this era, the trauma's still too near to talk about.

But in the early 2000s, the dot-com era arrived: we started thinking of ways to use this "internet" thing to make money. Everybody needed a domain name, even if they didn't have a business plan. The Bubble Popped. Loads of businesses went bankrupt. Millions in venture capital was flushed down the drain. People lost jobs... and fortunes... overnight.

During this bubble-pop, some new technological advancements entered the arena, dubbed "Web 2.0". It wasn't enough to visit a website and see a bunch of static content, users needed to interact with the site. The browser, with interactive technologies like Flash and Javascript, rose to prominence... and we started thinking about ways that we could interact with people using the internet. First there were web forums, but those gradually became larger and larger communities, eventually evolving into Social Media websites. Myspace... and then Facebook... along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and a host of others, consumed us. We could keep up with our friends around the world, and share our thoughts and news in a way we had never been able to before!

But you can't run a site that serves billions of users on goodwill. These sites started as side projects born of the desire to connect someone to their colleagues, friends, family, or neighbors, but they never charged their users to participate. (At least, the ones who survived never did...) They needed a way to pay for the massive amounts of infrastructure they created.

And then came the advertisers. One by one, the revenue pressures of running a business consumed each of the "connection" platforms. Today, my feed consists of a ratio of about 1 friend's post to 3-4 "Promoted" posts for things I never subscribed to. We all hate it, but the platform has to make its money somehow and we'd all quit in a heartbeat if we had to pay to remain on the platform.

While this was happening, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and changed the way we communicate on the go. The phone platform offered apps of all sorts. The app stores were filled by developers doing what developers love to do: building things and sharing them. For a while, it was a fun place where we could explore the possibilities.

And then came the advertisers. Take a look at your app store now. You can classify all the apps as one of these types:

Free apps maintained by a large company to give you access to the systems you're already subscribed to (so they can keep you on their "real estate" as much as possible). Think Google services, or your car insurance company, or your social media platforms.
"Free" apps that do nothing unless you subscribe to the company's service (usually for a monthly fee).
Paid apps that you buy for a large price tag in order to use, just like old-school software purchases.
Paid apps that you buy for a tiny price tag (sometimes they're free apps too though) and then they nickel & dime you to death with "microtransactions" to unlock the full functionality.

I REALLY hope you're seeing the pattern here

Every technological advance in my lifetime has followed the same playbook:

Someone comes up with a cool idea that improves the world.
They share it, people love it, it scales up to the point that it "becomes a business" instead of being a hobby project
Shareholders demand profits, revenue pressures cause leadership to cave, this thing isn't gonna pay for itself!
We use the technology as a vehicle for advertising in order to pay for it
It becomes 💩💩💩.

Heck, we don't even have to talk about technology. I believe can generalize the pattern to this statement:

When anything good scales up to the level that Advertisers and "the Money Men" get involved, its death has already begun.

I see it in College Sports here in the US, where NIL (name, image, likeness) deals and The Transfer Portal are new factors, and the centuries-old tradition of playing for school pride has been replaced with athletes transferring between schools in order to build their own personal brands instead.

I see it in TV entertainment, where we all abandoned cable in favor of streaming services only to be saddled with price hikes and intrusive advertising (which were the main reason we cut the cable cord to begin with).

And that brings me to AI

Even this year during the Super Bowl, we began to see the stress fractures appear in AI companies... evidence that they're following the same path. Anthropic ran an ad throwing shade at OpenAI for the announcement that ChatGPT with Ads in your prompt responses was coming soon. Now it's easy to say "good job, Anthropic" and switch to Claude over GPT, but...

Leopards don't change spots, y'all. Big Tech has a consistent playbook. We're going to have a brief period that we will someday look back on as the "Golden Age of AI", when we're all building and learning and growing and enjoying the benefits... but it won't last long. Shareholders will grow tired of waiting. CFOs will rein in spending. CROs will look for ways to roll out price hikes. CEOs will talk about efficiency and profitability. Monetization will win out over open sharing yet again.

Why this is a Problem

I can hear some of you already: "We've weathered every previous iteration of this storm, Blink. There's nothing to worry about!"

This time is different though.

Kelsey Hightower, who's been a super-respected name in Tech for a long time now, had this somewhat tongue-in-cheek post on LinkedIn back in February:

It might just be played for laughs, but after following Kelsey for a long time, I read it differently. It's a nugget of wisdom wrapped in a bit of a flippant hot-take. You probably need somebody to hold up a sarcasm sign.

See, in all the previous tech advancement iterations, we collectively moved forward despite the setback. Lots of people lost jobs and/or fortunes when the dot-com bubble popped, but they still had improved skills that they could apply to show for it. You might be an unemployed frontend developer, but... you were still a frontend developer with marketable skills.

Contrast that with what's happening in the AI space. Experienced software engineers are seeing 6-10x efficiency boosts by building an army of Agents to do their bidding, but every time you tell the Agents to write the code for you, it moves you one step further away from having the intrinsic skill of writing code yourself.

(There's a really intriguing article over on Psychology Today suggesting that this isn't a "loss of ability", but instead "estrangement from the part of yourself that thinks". Semantics aside, the end result looks pretty similar.)

Now let's fast-forward on the inevitable path toward monetization of AI. You've sacrificed your own personal expertise for speed-of-delivery, and you've put all that expertise... where, exactly?

...behind a subscription fee.

We've seen the articles, y'all. Investors are pouring MASSIVE amounts of money into AI companies. Those investments will eventually have to be settled someday... and where are they going to get the money to settle it up?

Advertisements and/or Subscription fees. And since we've already expressed our distaste for a world where AI is "polluted" with advertising... guess who's going to foot the bill when the investors stop?

That's right... you are.

These companies aren't giving away Artificial Intelligence as a service - they're harvesting human intelligence and putting it behind a paywall, to rent it back out to you.

Uh, is Blink becoming, like, a Doomsday Prepper or something?

Nope, I'm not. I'm also not saying that you shouldn't use AI tooling. I firmly believe that as technology professionals, we should be fluent in technology, even kinds that we hold at arm's length. In fact, I think maybe we should be even more fluent in the kinds we hold at arm's length... because we need to understand it well enough to make informed decisions.

Get in there, learn how AI tooling works, learn what it's good at and what it absolutely should NOT be used for. Build. Grow. But most importantly...

Under NO circumstances should you stop learning to do it the "old-fashioned way".

Because someday soon, you're going to realize that you have to pay them for the privilege of having a bot do the thing you used to be able to do on your own.

The Adventures of Blink S5e10: Wrapping it All Up

Ben Link — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:05:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today on The Adventures of Blink, we wrap up our our Breakout clone - we'll learn how to turn a python script into an executable and then how to post a project to itch.io.

If you're the kind of person who waits to start a series until you can binge the whole thing... now is your moment! Come by, 👍🏻 and subscribe, and learn to build with me!

The Adventures will return this Fall... but come back here next week for the usual offseason blog posts! See ya 'round!

The Adventures of Blink S5e9: Saving and Loading

Ben Link — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today's adventure adds a key feature to our Breakout clone - the ability to save our progress, and load it back. Thing is, we don't want to write those components from scratch on our own... so we're going to let the system help us.

Stop by the channel, 👍🏻 and subscribe... you know the drill. Let's build together!

The Adventures of Blink S5e8: Special Bricks

Ben Link — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:35:00 +0000

Hey friends! What a season it's been - This Adventure of Blink is flying right by. We have a working game, but... we'd like to have a little something more. What if we had special bricks in the game that, when you hit them, caused a second ball to enter the game?

Stop by the channel and let's build together... and please leave me a 👍🏻, a 💬, and subscribe!

The Adventures of Blink S5e7: Winning is Everything

Ben Link — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:05:00 +0000

Hey friends! Season 5 of The Adventures of Blink continues - we have a game that works, but we're missing something pretty important: the Win screen! Come join me today as we make it possible to win our game.

Leave me a 👍🏻 and a 💬 to help the channel, and subscribe so you won't miss future episodes!

The Adventures of Blink S5e6: On So Many Levels

Ben Link — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today on The Adventures of Blink, we're making our game last longer... by adding different levels. In order to make them work, we're going to need a level loader...

Come along and let's build together! Leave me a 👍🏻 and a 💬 to help the channel!

The Adventures of Blink S5e5: Collisions!

Ben Link — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:30:00 +0000

Hey friends, welcome to The Adventures of Blink! Today we continue our breakout clone build with some work on one of the key mechanics in the game: the ability for objects to collide with each other.

Make sure you leave a 👍🏻 and a 💬, and subscribe so you'll stay connected!

The Adventures of Blink S5e4: The Paddle and the Ball

Ben Link — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:45:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today on The Adventures of Blink, we've finally got the foundation we need, and it's time to start working on some gameplay features! We'll start with two key features: the Paddle and the Ball.

Make sure you leave a 👍🏻 and a 💬, and subscribe!

The Adventures of Blink S5e3: A Menu in Pygame

Ben Link — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:30:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today on The Adventures of Blink, we're building a main menu for our Breakout clone using Pygame. I know, I know... we don't have a game yet, but we're building a foundation here, gameplay's coming soon!

Make sure you leave a 👍🏻 and a 💬, and subscribe!

The Adventures of Blink S5e2: Logs and Configs

Ben Link — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:30:00 +0000

Hey friends! Today we continue building our Breakout clone with a look at how to set up logging, and how to build a configuration file for our game to use.

Come hang out, leave me a 👍🏻 and a 💬, and subscribe to the channel so you'll get notifications when new episodes drop!