Developer Productivity Engineering Newsletter

Trisha Gee presents Dec-21 on managing flaky tests | Netflix’s continued investment in DPE | Build Propulsion Lab interviews | DPE pioneer honored with Top 50 SaaS CEO award | The influence of Spotify’s internal developer portal Backstage | What Atlassian’s CTO thinks drives productivity

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

Dec-21: How to prevent flaky tests from ruining developer productivity (and your day) with Trisha Gee

Dealing with flaky tests is a significant challenge in software development, even for the most advanced development teams. These indeterminant and unpredictable tests can pass or fail without any differences in code, casting doubt on the reliability of your toolchain and ultimately on the application itself.

Join developer advocate Trisha Gee for this free 1-hour event to learn how you can leverage Develocity to help identify, prioritize, and fix flaky tests using a data-driven approach. Topics covered include:

The cognitive and financial costs of flaky tests
The various causes of test flakiness
How to track down the worst of your flaky tests
Flaky test remediation strategies for the long term

Save your seat

BEST PRACTICES

What’s driving Netflix's continued investment in DPE and developer happiness?

Kathryn Koehler, director of productivity engineering at Netflix, has one goal in mind: to “enable Netflix developers to focus on their day jobs and not have to worry about all the different Netflix-isms, [that exist] all the way through the software development lifecycle, to get up and running.”

Netflix has a highly-focused, centralized platform team of 150 people dedicated to optimizing developer productivity and the developer experience. Over half of these people are directly involved in DPE, focused on build and test performance (both locally and on CI) and on the end-to-end developer experience—essentially, everything up to deployment.

Koehler describes what makes this all work at Netflix, specifically the use of SPACE, DORA, and custom metrics for measuring developer productivity; the importance of keeping a finger on the pulse of developer happiness with regular internal surveys; and educating and onboarding Netflix engineers about their internal platform, especially those who aren't aware of the productivity gains offered by the DPE team’s toolchain.

Read her interview with The New Stack to learn more, and then continue to follow the story with "DPE Lowdown - How Netflix does Developer Productivity Engineering", featuring Danny Thomas from the Netflix Productivity Engineering team:

Watch the Netflix Lowdown

EXPERT TAKES

LinkedIn, Meta, and Netflix visit the Build Propulsion Lab and talk shop

The Build Propulsion Lab (BPL) is a roving space where experts share their insights on build performance optimization topics and even perform hands-on proof of concept experiments on real projects.

During DPE Summit 2023, the BPL team from Gradle sat down with some of the event speakers and expert attendees for short, 10-20 minute interviews. These three interviews in particular feature speakers whose talks were voted most popular by the DPE Summit 2023 audience:

The full playlist of Build Propulsion Lab interviewees includes engineering leaders at Adobe, AtomicJar, Block, JetBrains, Pinterest, and Slack:

Watch all interviews

INDUSTRY NEWS

DPE pioneer and Gradle founder honored with Top 50 SaaS CEO award

Hans Dockter, CEO and founder of Gradle and the visionary behind the practice of DPE, has been honored by The Software Report as a Top 50 SaaS CEO. Celebrating leaders recognized for their strategic prowess and inspiration, this annual report features CEOs who drive cutting-edge software solutions.

Hans was recognized as the creator of Gradle Build Tool, the open-source build system, and Develocity (formerly Gradle Enterprise), the first DPE solution platform. Check out Hans’ latest DPE thought-leadership by watching his provocative DPE Summit keynote on the cognitive science behind DPE.

Watch the keynote

IDEAS & INSIGHT

Spotify’s DPE portal Backstage dominates industry conversations as external adoption exceeds 4 million users

Across the globe, engineering leaders from Spotify are telling the remarkable story of Backstage—their internal developer portal created to increase developer productivity that they later donated to the CNCF. Now with over 4 million external users, Backstage is taking the front stage (excuse the pun!) at industry events like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, DPE Summit, and the dedicated BackstageCon conference (by the Linux Foundation).

This article by Forbes discusses how Backstage has emerged as the premier platform to seamlessly integrate a vast array of developer tools, documentation, and templates—all to address the challenges faced by developers in navigating a complex array of technologies and resources within an organization. Red Hat’s significant investment into various plugins and integrations for the Backstage ecosystem to streamline developer workflows is particularly noteworthy.

To get a deeper dive into Backstage, check out the recent "DPE Lowdown - How Spotify Does Developer Productivity Engineering with Backstage" featuring Lee Mills, Senior Engineering Manager at Spotify. Lee tells us the story of how Backstage was created with DPE in mind to accelerate developer productivity by eliminating distractions and delays.

Watch the Lowdown

DPE SUCCESS STORIES

Atlassian's CTO asks: Can unlocking joy unlock developer productivity?

For Rajeev Rajan, CTO at Atlassian, it's all about enabling the 5,000 developers in his organization to experience the joy of creation and a sense of pride in their work. Rajeev and his team believe that joy is the key to unlocking developer productivity.

This makes sense. In a recent TechValidate survey of over 50 Develocity users (including Spotify, Revolut, and Applied Materials), 84% agree that DPE’s impact on their toolchain makes their job more enjoyable.

So, how does Atlassian unlock developer joy? They implemented a three-part developer productivity framework that they say has led to noticeable progress and increased developer satisfaction. In short, their solution involves 1) providing excellent tooling, 2) empowering teams to be the change they seek, and 3) nurturing a strong engineering culture. There’s a lot more more to it, of course, so read the full article on DevOps.com:

Read the article

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

DPE Job Openings

The industry needs you! You might find your dream role among these job openings related to DPE, developer productivity, and platform engineering.

NOTE: These postings are active at the time of sending but are subject to change.

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