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Season 1 of DevProdEng Showdown is well underway with three episodes that have been viewed live or on-demand by over 6,000 people since our pilot episode aired in January. You can register for Episode 4 which takes place Wednesday, May 26, 2021 (10am SF, 1pm NY, 6pm London, 7pm Berlin). The topic is “Android Architecture and Developer Productivity Engineering at Scale.”
If you are not already familiar with DevProdEng Showdown, it’s a series of live-streamed 30-minute episodes where a panel of distinguished experts debate hot topics related to Developer Productivity Engineering in a rapid-fire game show-like format. Check out our pilot episode highlight reel to get a better idea of what you’re in for if you decide to attend and participate as a judge.
Here’s a great example of one expert take shared in our most recent episode. The question was ‘how would you explain to upper management why they should spend more resources on developer productivity?’ The expert panelist responses follow:
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Matt Raible (Okta): “I would show them how long it takes to do something like check out a project and just do an npm install and not say a thing and make them wait. Also, I would record some data for a typical engineer for a week to see how much time they spend in meetings to convince management [to invest]. |
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Trisha Gee (JetBrains): “I agree [with Matt]. It is about data, but it’s about giving them specific costs. For example, I used to work at a place where it would take three hours to release software every two weeks. If you break down the cost of resources required for release and you show that to management, that really opens their eyes to how much these processes actually cost.” |
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James Ward (Google): “Companies should study how happy their developers are. I’ve met with so many developers who are very unproductive and whose life has been made so painful by IT. |
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Baruch Sadogursky (Jfrog): “Data is the only way to go. My take on it, however, is that the data really has to be business data — how developer productivity [investments] help companies release faster, update security faster, make developers happier…” |
As you can see, James won this round…
