Click here to view the episode transcript. In this week's episode, Abi is joined by industry leaders Idan Gazit from GitHub, Anna Sulkina from Airbnb, and Alix Melchy from Jumio. Together, they discuss the impact of GenAI tools on developer productivity, exploring challenges in measurement and enhancement. They delve into AI's evolving role in engineering, from overcoming friction points to exploring real-world applications and the future of technology. Gain insights into how AI-driven chat assi...
Jul 17, 2024•35 min•Ep. 66
Click here to view the episode transcript. In this week's episode, Abi welcomes Jared Wolinsky, Vice President of Platform Engineering at SiriusXM, to delve into the inner workings of platform engineering at SiriusXM. Jared sheds light on their innovative approach to prioritizing projects, emphasizing alignment with overarching business goals. They explore how these strategies boost developer speed and drive technological advancement within the organization. Links: When is the right time to esta...
Jun 19, 2024•41 min•Ep. 65
Click here to view the episode transcript'. In this episode, Michelle Swartz, Vice president of Developer Enablement American Express, shares insights on improving developer experience. She discusses the creation of an onboarding bootcamp and the development of the AmEx Way Library for better knowledge management. Michelle explains how AmEx balances standardization and flexibility with the concept of Paved Roads. She also highlights the importance of measuring success, fostering community, and e...
Jun 04, 2024•45 min•Ep. 64
Click here to view the episode transcript'. This week’s episode is a recording from a recent event hosted by Abi Noda (CEO of DX) and Laura Tacho (CTO at DX). The episode begins with an overview of the DORA, SPACE, and DevEx frameworks, including where they overlap and common misconceptions about each. Laura and Abi discuss the advantages and drawbacks of each framework, then discuss how to choose which framework to use. Mentions and Links: Dora.dev Discussion points: 2:50- DORA, SPACE, DevEx ov...
May 21, 2024•40 min•Ep. 63
Click here to view the episode transcript. In this week's episode, we welcome Derek DeBellis, lead researcher on Google's DORA team, for a deep dive into the science and methodology behind DORA's research. We explore Derek's background, his role at Google, and how DORA intersects with other research disciplines. Derek takes us through DORA's research process step by step, from defining outcomes and factors to survey design, analysis, and structural equation modeling. Mentions and Links: Derek De...
May 07, 2024•48 min•Ep. 62
Click here to view the episode transcript. This week we’re joined by Sean Mcllroy from Slack’s Release Engineering team to learn about how they’ve fully automated their deployment process. This conversation covers Slack’s original release process, key changes Sean’s team has made, and the latest challenges they’re working on today. Mentions and links: Read Sean’s blog post, The Scary Thing About Deploys Follow Sean on LinkedIn Time Stamps: (1:34): The Release Engineering team (2:13): How the mon...
Apr 23, 2024•34 min•Ep. 61
Click here to view the episode transcript. This week’s episode is the recording of a live conversation between Abi and Chris Westerhold (Thoughtworks Head of Developer Experience). This conversation is useful for anyone early in their journey with developer portals or platforms: Abi and Chris discuss common approaches to solving these problems, pitfalls to avoid, building vs. buying, and more. Mentions and Links Follow Chris on LinkedIn Watch the recording of this conversation Watch part 2 of th...
Apr 09, 2024•36 min•Ep. 60
Click here to listen to the episode transcript. On this week's episode, Abi interviews Kent Wills, Director of Engineering Effectiveness at Yelp. He shares insights into the evolution of their developer productivity efforts over the past decade. From tackling challenges with their monolithic architecture to scaling productivity initiatives for over 1,300 developers. Kent also touches on his experience in building a business case for developer productivity. Discussion points: (1:42) Forming the d...
Mar 26, 2024•45 min•Ep. 59
This week we’re joined by Gail Carmichael, Principal Instructional Engineer at Splunk. At Splunk, Gail’s team is responsible for improving developer onboarding, which they do through a multi-day learning program. Here, Gail shares how this program works and how they measure developer onboarding. The conversation also covers what instructional engineers are generally, and how Gail demonstrates the impact of her team’s work. Discussion points: (1:16) The Engineering Enablement & Engagement Tea...
Mar 12, 2024•40 min•Ep. 58
In this episode we’re joined by Adam Rogal, who leads Developer Productivity and Platform at DoorDash. Adam describes DoorDash’s journey with their internal developer portal, and gives advice for other teams looking to follow a similar path. Adam also describes how his team delivered value quickly and drove adoption for their developer platform. Discussion points: (1:47) Why DoorDash explored implementing a developer portal (6:59) The initial vision for the developer portal 12:19 Funding ongoing...
Feb 27, 2024•55 min•Ep. 57
In this episode, Abi has a fascinating conversation with Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks's CTO, Camilla Crispim, and Erik Dörnenburg on the ThoughtWorks Tech Radar . The trio begins with an overview of Tech Radar and its history before delving into the intricate process of creating each report involving multiple teams and stakeholders. The conversation concludes with a focus on the evolution of Tech Radar's design and process and potential future changes. This episode offers Tech Radar fans an exc...
Feb 13, 2024•46 min•Ep. 56
This week's guest is Eirini Kalliamvakou, a staff researcher at GitHub focused on AI and developer experience. Eirini sits at the forefront of research into GitHub Copilot. Abi and Eirini discuss recent research on how AI coding assistance impacts developer productivity. They talk about how leaders should build business cases for AI tools. They also preview what's to come with AI tools and implications for how developer productivity is measured. Discussion points: (1:49) Overview of GitHub’s res...
Jan 31, 2024•48 min•Ep. 55
Christopher Sanson is a product manager at Airbnb who is dedicated to enhancing developer productivity and tooling. Today, we learn more about Airbnb's developer productivity team and how various teams use metrics, both within and outside the organization. From there, we dive even deeper into their measurement journey, highlighting their implementation of DORA metrics and the challenges they overcame throughout the process. Discussion points: (2:43) Who is the developer productivity customer (4:...
Jan 03, 2024•41 min•Ep. 54
In this episode, Abi speaks with Ana Petkovska, who is currently leading the developer experience team at Nexthink. Ana takes us through her journey of leading a DevOps team that underwent multiple transformations. She explains how her team went from being a DevOps team to EngProd and eventually DevEx. Ana elaborates on her team's challenges and the reasons behind the shift in focus. She also shares how she discovered EngProd and used data from companies like Google to convince her company to in...
Dec 13, 2023•27 min•Ep. 53
In this episode, Abi chats with Grant Jenks, Senior Staff SWE, Engineering Insights @ LinkedIn. They dive into LinkedIn's developer insights platform, iHub, and its backstory. The conversation covers qualitative versus quantitative metrics, sharing concerns about these terms and exploring their correlation. The episode wraps up with technical topics like winsorized means, thoughts on composite scores, and ways AI can benefit developer productivity teams. (1:10) Insights in the productivity space...
Dec 06, 2023•52 min•Ep. 52
This week's episode is with Jim Beyers, VP of Engineering Enablement at CVS Health. Jim joined CVS a year ago to lead an effort to build an internal developer platform. Abi and Jim discuss how Jim joined CVS to build an internal developer platform, what brought him to the job, and how the developer experience fits into the broader transformation goals of CVS. Additionally, this episode covers building the team, defining a strategy, and how he's thinking about winning the hearts and minds across ...
Nov 22, 2023•31 min•Ep. 51
This week we spoke with Nils Loodin, Platform Product Manager at Spotify. Nils describes how his role in platform product management works, including unique challenges, approaches, and career considerations. Nils also discusses some of the recent changes within Spotify's platform organization, including shifting teams from tech-centric to journey-centric. Discussion points: (1:30) How Nils came into his role (3:59) How “developer experience” came into the picture at Spotify (5:30) How the Platfo...
Nov 15, 2023•52 min•Ep. 50
This week we’re joined by Justin Wright and Matthew Dimich, who lead Platform Engineering and Engineering Enablement at Thomson Reuters. Justin and Matt give an inside look at how they’ve evolved their organization’s structure and approach over the past 8 years. Discussion points: (1:03) Founding the platform team (5:49) The current organizational structure (9:00) Key initiatives the platform organization is focused on (12:55) The enablement function within platform (16:44) What drove the engage...
Nov 08, 2023•41 min•Ep. 49
This week’s episode dives into the DORA research program and this year’s State of DevOps Report. Nathen Harvey, who leads DORA at Google, shares the key findings from the research and what’s changed since previous reports. Discussion points: (1:10) What DORA focuses on (2:17) Where the DORA metrics fit (4:35) Introduction to user-centric software development (8:05) Impact of user-centricity on software delivery (9:40) Team performance vs. organizational performance (13:50) Importance of internal...
Oct 25, 2023•46 min•Ep. 48
This week we’re joined by Preeti Kota, the Head of Engineering for Compass at Atlassian. Preeti walks us through Atlassian’s journey with developer experience: including how they measure DevEx, and how they drive improvements through efforts at both the organization and team levels. Preeti also talks about how this journey has led to the development of Atlassian’s newly released internal developer portal, Compass. Mentions and links: Learn about Compass , Atlassian’s newly released internal deve...
Oct 18, 2023•45 min•Ep. 47
This week we’re joined by Mark Côté, who leads the Developer Infrastructure organization at Shopify, to learn about their developer survey program. Mark shares what went into designing and running the survey, what they’ve done to drive participation rates higher, and how they interpret their data. Mentions and links: Follow Mark on LinkedIn Read Shopify’s engineering blog Discussion points: (1:32) Starting the survey (3:20) How the survey has evolved (4:22) Three types of information gleaned fro...
Sep 27, 2023•44 min•Ep. 46
Thomas Khalil, Head of Platform and SRE at Trivago, describes how the teams reporting into him are structured, the tactics they’re using to increase awareness of their work, and how they demonstrate their impact. Discussion points: (1:17) The pillars of the Central Platform organization (2:18) The organization’s focus on time to market and efficiency (3:09) The differences in developer experience between teams (4:37) Deciding whether to consolidate services (5:57) How platform, developer experie...
Aug 22, 2023•31 min•Ep. 42
This week’s guest is Jenny McClain, who leads R&D Team Enablement at Toast. Jenny’s team focuses on enabling individual teams at Toast to drive their own productivity improvements, and this conversation dives into how they tackle this problem. Discussion points: (1:19) How the R&D Enablement team works (2:50) Why the team was formed (4:31) The types of work the team focuses on (7:31) Identifying the problems this team would solve (11:23) How team embeds work (17:19) The learning resource...
Aug 16, 2023•44 min•Ep. 45
This week we’re joined by Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green, who lead the Engineering Productivity Research team at Google. Ciera and Collin have written several papers from studies they’ve conducted, and this discussion covers the insights from their research as well as their work more broadly at Google. Discussion points: (1:19) About the Engineering Productivity Research team (3:57) How the team interacts with the rest of the organization (5:58) The different backgrounds included on the team (13:...
Aug 02, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 44
This week we’re joined by Jason Kennedy, Senior Engineering Manager of Developer Experience at One Medical. Jason’s team takes a uniquely customer-driven approach to improving the developer experience, and in this episode he describes their philosophy and how it works in practice. Jason explains how they shadow developers, how they run surveys, and more. Discussion points: (1:02) Renaming from Engineering Efficiency to Engineering Experience (4:17) How Platform and DevEx teams differ (5:38) How ...
Jul 12, 2023•45 min•Ep. 43
Matthew and Luke lead Extend’s Developer Experience team, a team that has approached their work in a way that is more forward-thinking than most. In this episode, they cover how they deliver impact at multiple levels of the organization, their journey with productivity metrics, and how they’ve made DevEx a C-level concern. Discussion points: (1:40) How the DevEx team started and where it fits at Extend (5:08) Tradeoffs of DevEx reporting into Platform (6:40) The mandate and tasks they focus on (...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 40
Manuel Pais delves into one of the concepts covered in his book “Team Topologies”: platform and enabling work. Manuel shares how he views the strategy behind when and how to invest in platform or enabling work. This conversation also goes into each type of work in more detail, covering topics such as measuring cognitive load and where platform engineering may be heading in the future. (2:13) How enabling teams and platform teams are different (10:28) What it looks like for a team to own both pla...
Jun 07, 2023•53 min•Ep. 39
Thansha Sadacharam, who leads Tech Learning and Insights at Peloton walks us through the journey of building the company’s developer experience survey. She shares what went into the survey’s design, rollout, and maintenance, as well as the different teams involved. Discussion points: (1:19) Where the idea for running a developer survey originated (6:36) Advice for other leaders getting buy-in for these initiatives (11:27) The first steps in designing the survey (18:21) How the survey incorporate...
May 24, 2023•59 min•Ep. 38
In this episode, Abi is interviewed by Laura Tacho about the new paper he co-authored with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, and Dr. Michaela Greiler. Abi and Laura discuss the pitfalls of some of the common metrics organizations use, and how the new paper builds on prior frameworks such as DORA and SPACE to offer a new approach to measuring and improving developer productivity. Discussion topics: (2:20) Laura’s background (3:59) Laura’s view on git metrics (11:05) What developer ex...
May 16, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 37
Tara Hernandez, the VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB, joins the podcast to give an inside look at what the developer experience looks like at an organization that develops a database. Here, Tara shares what it looks like to develop, test, and release changes at MongoDB, while also providing insight into how the company invests in developer productivity more broadly. Discussion points: (0:57) What was going on at the time Tara joined (4:37) Tara’s perspective on the buzz of platform engine...
May 02, 2023•40 min•Ep. 36
