Developer Experience Is My Obsession. As Our New CDXO, Here’s Why

Alokai co-founder Filip Rakowski today stepped down as CTO to take up a new company role as chief developer experience officer (CDXO). In this blog, Filip explains what motivated this change and why he wants to take DX to another level.

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The reason why Alokai stands out from other tools on the market is its developer-centric approach. While most of the companies in the MACH space build their software for business users, our mission is to make developers' work more efficient and enjoyable. 

Ultimately, nothing brings as much customizability and flexibility (which is essential for enterprise users) as code. The complexity of composable stacks is overwhelming, though. We need better tools. Luckily, we’re building them in Alokai!

To our dev community: thank you!

With over 2,000 live stores and 10,000 developers in the Alokai community, we are the most popular solution for building eCommerce storefronts worldwide. We became a market standard not because we were smarter or knew more — but because of our open, collaborative and developer-centric approach. 

It’s safe to say that Alokai was elevated to its market leader position by developers who trusted us, contributed their ideas, and pushed Alokai in their companies. We are forever grateful to our community for their trust, and we are committed to continuing to prove that we’re worth it!

Alokai’s case is not unique in the open source space. React, Vue, Nuxt, Tailwind — these are all technologies that became market standards with zero initial marketing budget. Purely because they solved the right problem in the right way and prioritized their users. 

A winning obsession

Despite growing from a side open source project to a company of more than 100 people, we still believe that the best way to build a great product is by delivering an outstanding developer experience and listening to the users.

As a CTO and co-founder of an early-stage startup, I had to focus on a lot of things in the last two years. Every month was full of surprises and new challenges. Two years later, we are a different company. 

The initial mess was replaced by processes and many layers of quality assurance. Growing organizational maturity opens up new possibilities. While developer experience was always one of our priorities, now we can take it to a completely new level and give it much more attention.

That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that today I’m starting a new role as a Chief Developer Experience Officer.

My goal is simple: deliver the best developer experience on the market, and I look forward to working with our developer community to help achieve that goal. I believe that good collaboration is not possible without transparency, so I’ll be documenting the process on our blog and in our developer newsletter ! 

Let’s make Alokai great together!

Follow Filip on LinkedIn and Twitter.