DPE Summit 2024 tickets, DPE Tours come to Europe, what to know about cognitive fatigue, and why developer toil is now in the spotlight. Also, a new Quiz, DPE stat, and DPE job openings! Catch me at owhite@gradle.com if you need anything :-) Have a safe and productive month!

 

INDUSTRY NEWS

DPE Summit 2024 returns to San Francisco—super early bird tickets on sale—and DPE Tour heads to Europe

DPE Summit 2024

 

DPE Summit 2024 registration has officially kicked off and the event will return to San Francisco on September 24-25.

 

Register now to secure your Super Early-Bird rate of $199, and stay tuned to hear about our first wave of speakers in the coming weeks. 

 

DPE Tour

 

DPE City Tours are in full swing and will come to Europe this summer. Join DPE and DevEx experts from some of the most exciting companies in the world during these half-day, in-person events and enjoy drinks, snacks, and hallway chats! 
More on DPE Summit 2024

EXPERT TAKES

Podcast (16-min): Hans Dockter describes how cognitive fatigue impacts developer productivity

Is your brain trying to tell you something? For software developers and other "knowledge workers" who generally spend their time in front of screens, cognitive fatigue is an under-appreciated threat to our well-being.  

 

In this short podcast with “What the Dev?”, Hans Dockter (founder and CEO of Gradle, Inc.) talks with David Rubinstein (SD Times Editor-in-Chief) about how cognitive fatigue is compounding the software productivity problem. Topics discussed include:

  • The wealth of knowledge around cognitive science and why it has yet to be applied to the software industry

  • The differences between cognitive tasks that are "learned and effortless" (not walking into trees in a forest) and tasks that require "cognitive control" (solving a problem with code)

  • How science shows that delays, interruptions, and frequent task-switching among developers all contribute to cognitive fatigue

  • Why the value of the "flow state" of focused attention contributes to developer satisfaction and happiness

  • How LeBron James is getting it right :-)

Listen: “What the Dev?” with Hans

QUIZ SECTION

Without looking it up, which of the following are not actual AI-based development tools?

  1. Codeium

  2. CodeWhisperer

  3. Code Mule

  4. Copilot

  5. Devin

  6. Sori

  7. Tabnine 

p.s. answer at the bottom of the page

 

IDEAS & INSIGHT

"Toil and trouble" is starting to bubble onto the radar of IT executives and analysts

Hocus Pocus/Walt Disney Studios

 

Toil (verb/noun) - work extremely hard or incessantly, or move slowly and with difficulty | exhausting physical labor

 

- New Oxford American Dictionary

 

Toil sounds like a word from ancient religious text, mythology, or fairy tales. It's normal to talk about "efficiency", "workload", and "developer productivity"—but these terms are neutral and vague at best. But TOIL...now we're talking about work that is exhausting, unpleasant, thankless, unrewarded...you get it. 

 

What actually causes toil? Stack Overflow in 2022 showed that 45% of developers point to "lack of productivity" as a source of toil and unhappiness at work. Debo Ray, CEO of DevZero, writes in Forbes that developer toil has become normalized in IT organizations, and recent mass layoffs in the tech industry have catapulted developer toil to Public Enemy #1. 

 

Ray points to factors like long feedback cycles due to slow builds and tests, lack of platform engineering and internal tooling (= IDPs), and complex code dependencies as primary targets for addressing developer toil. This assessment touches on the fundamentals of DPE—that developer toil and anti-productivity should be addressed with tools and technologies to accelerate feedback cycles and reduce cognitive fatigue (see above).


Bonus: take the time to watch LinkedIn's Max Kanat-Alexander humorously describe his recipe for *increasing* developer toil in his ironic 15-min keynote from DPE Summit 2023:

 
Watch: “How to Make Your Developers Unproductive and Unhappy”

DPE STATS

85% of dev teams say builds and tests are slow

According to over 60 customer surveys, 85% of IT organizations experienced challenges related to too much time spent waiting on build and test feedback.

 
Go to the source of this statistic

BEST PRACTICES

GitHub and Airbnb talk Gen-AI success with Copilot on the latest DPE Lowdown

Christopher Harrison from GitHub and Szczepan Faber from Airbnb describe how Copilot customers are doing DPE with AI. 

 

Christopher shares the details behind how Copilot customers are using the tool to get a 30-40% increase in productivity while seeing improvements in code quality by decreasing build failure rates. Szczepan Faber then describes how hundreds of developers at Airbnb have found DevProd benefits using Copilot and other AI-based development technologies.

 
Watch: “How GitHub Copilot does DPE with AI”

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.

 

Quiz Answer:

3) Code Mule and 6) Sori aren’t real…but could be someday! ;-)

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