DPE Summit 2023

2023-09-21

2023-09-20 and 2023-09-21: at the Developer Productivity Engineering Summit, sponsored by Gradle, in San Francisco California at the Midway event space near Pier 80.

DPE Summit - beware Flash-like animated intro.

The funny bent infinity sign is Facebook/Meta's logo, which I didn't recognize, and it wasn't linked to FB/Meta, so I was left guessing for a while.

Common Themes

• "A paved workflow"

  • 80% of development team members can usually follow a fully automated, audited, secure path which makes development and deployment easy and fast
  • 20% of development teams need a somewhat customized workflow, or a completely separate one.
  • Many risks and management / auditing needs can be folded into this paved workflow, with allowed ways to escape its guardrails (at the cost of having to maintain more of your team's workflow tooling).

• Generative AI...

  • Copilot is good for API boilerplate
  • otherwise people are playing around with it as an idea generator

• Luke Hohmann's concepts of "marketecture"

  • how to design business considerations into your software based service
  • how to negotiate possible business opportunities, such that the technical architecture supports business.
  • mentioned once in the context of a trusted third-party service integrator
  • mentioned once in the context of how you describe your build automation tool platform to an enterprise customer

Sponsors

Gradle Incorporated (host) Meta (Facebook), Uber, Netflix, JetBrains.

Me on TV

One of the Gradle Inc hosts talked with me about one of my developer productivity success stories and asked about how far we'd come since then.

YouTube, Jeffrey Miller DPESummit 2023

Me: Software development is facing problems of success, which relate to transmission of working knowledge at the team level, distinct from tool or technology knowledge. While online learning resources and tooling are accessibly like never before, we don't retain wisdom as a field. The way we (fail to) manage teams and knowledge sharing loses so much. And the Mythical Man-Month is still relevant, meaning that we haven't learned its lessons.

Sessions Attended

JetBrains, What is Developer Success?

• Alexander Podkhaliuzin, JetBrains
• JetBrains' evolution from a developer-focused IDE company toward opportunities with enterprise customers
• Different classes of problems for large customers and large repositories
• Ways of expressing problems in terms of cost efficiency and time efficiency (developer success at scale)
• Ways of collecting metrics which inform choices in what to change, improve, or add to workflow
• Ways of providing enterprise customers self-hosted services for their needs like shared code indexing of large code bases, allowing JetBrains' IDEs to shine.

Netflix, Testing Experience

• Roberto Perez Alcolea, Aubrey Chipman; follows last year's talk on Build, also posted as a Gradle talk. Last year's talk: How we Built a Distributed Testing Platform

Apple, The Dependency Graph

• a successively refined environment which created a "paved path" for 80% of service development teams
• service and library dependencies made visible and obvious and linked to teams
• Gradle Enterprise build plug-ins were also monitored for usage and compatibility
• Unused APIs could be retired;
• Teams could be assured that a particular change would not affect their service because it did not depend on the changed item, increasing certainty and removing cause for delay.
• 20% of teams still needed customization or an opt-out (e.g. "secret projects", perhaps hardware related software dev teams)

LinkedIn, How to Make Developers Unhappy and Unproductive

• Framed as "here's a thing that makes developers unhappy and unproductive, so"
• Instead, do THIS.
• Again, a 80-90% paved path (common setup, easy-in) for most dev teams.

Spotify, Backstage, from service inventory to plug-in service backplane, with a personal anecdote about Backstage plugins for hospital radiology.

• biggest pain points were an explosion of microservices and developer onboarding
• started out as a service inventory, with gradually added metadata and links
• template applications allow new devs to hoist pre-approved services with hooks into CI/CD and approved credential use
• templates allow calling out to specialist teams for workflow needed before the apps can be promoted to production
• Open Source model allows the addition of many, many plugins to support various build tools, or to reveal views of metadata
• the plugins for a particular service type might be specified as a group; maybe including source views, CI/CD status, operational data, bug tracking; or different for different types of service
• hospital radiology plugin with some suggestive pre-diagnosis highlights ended up being directly helpful to the speaker, a Spotify Backstage person.