Developer Productivity Engineering Newsletter

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

Oct-18: Apollo Kotlin joins DPE Lowdown

In this upcoming episode of DevProdEng Lowdown, we chat with Martin Bonnin, mobile engineer at Apollo, to get the lowdown on their DPE wins.

Join us to learn how the Apollo Kotlin team leveraged Develocity (formerly Gradle Enterprise) to optimize their build and test speeds, resulting in a mean CI build time decrease from ~28 to ~4 minutes (see their public dashboard). You will also learn what next steps the team is taking in their journey toward DPE excellence. Specifically, this Lowdown will cover:

What is the Apollo Kotlin project and how does it work with GraphQL?
How has using remote build cache impacted CI efficiency?
How does the team identify and debug cache misses with Build Validation scripts?
How did Apollo collaborate with Gradle and JetBrains to resolve build cacheability issues?
What have been some of the project’s most impactful developer productivity wins?

Save your seat

COMMUNITY NEWS

Sold-out DPE Summit 2023 signals rapid growth of DPE practice and interest in DevX topics

This year’s DPE Summit was a sold-out event. Over 500 attendees from some of the most innovative development organizations came together in San Francisco to discuss the latest practices, tools, and tactics related to DPE and DevX.

Gradle founder and CEO Hans Dockter delivered the first keynote along with a challenge to look outside the software industry as a way of informing our approach to measuring developer productivity. Over the next two days, attendees saw keynotes from Uber and Airbnb and received detailed learnings from over 35 engineering leaders on what’s working and what’s next.

DPE Summit 2023 recordings are being prepared and will be published in the coming weeks—until then, please enjoy some Build Propulsion Lab interviews recorded with select speakers.

Watch now

EXPERT TAKES

The New Stack: Metrics-Driven Developer Productivity Engineering at Spotify

Shortly after speaking at DPE Summit 2023, Laurent Ploix, engineering manager on the Platform Insights team at Spotify, sat down with The New Stack to discuss metrics-informed development as it relates to developer productivity and platform engineering.

In the article, Laurent describes how the industry’s search for the right developer productivity metrics led Spotify to put things on a scale: from leading metrics (e.g. short-term, tactical engineering actions), to lagging metrics (e.g. the resulting value and impact on long-term business trends).

Read the article to discover their remaining challenges—both in connecting the long-term metrics to developer productivity actions and in avoiding reliance on "vanity" leading metrics for gauging developer productivity gains. The article also explains why collecting data needed to tie developer metrics to organizational goals is so important.

Read the article

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Leading DPE-enabling software platform Gradle Enterprise is now Develocity

Gradle recently announced that it has re-branded Gradle Enterprise—the new name is now Develocity. So why the change?

According to Hans Dockter, Gradle Inc. founder and CEO, “we chose the name Develocity because it tells you unambiguously who this product is for and what business value we deliver. This means supporting all major build systems over time and ensuring that development organizations don’t have to migrate from their current tool of choice.”

While “Gradle Enterprise” served the company well since the product’s inception, over time the name became more of a liability than an advantage. Specifically, there was a common misconception that Gradle Enterprise was just for the Gradle Build Tool, whereas the company’s multi-build system support strategy for not only Gradle Build Tool, but also Apache Maven, Bazel, and sbt, has gained traction and yielded a major solution advantage.

Read the press release

BEST PRACTICES

Forbes: Re-Energizing Your Digital Transformation Initiative With Quick Wins

In this Forbes Technology Council article, Hans Dockter, founder and CEO of Gradle, explains how DPE can be used to re-energize digital transformation journeys. His strategy is to re-energize the change agents (you, the developer) by focusing you on quick wins that pave the way for more efficient architecture transformations and align with executive-level metrics and goals. Specifically, it covers:

How DPE targets core developer pains to improve the developer experience
How to drive faster software delivery TTM with DPE
How to drive software quality with DPE
How to lower software development costs with DPE
Next steps

UPCOMING EVENTS

Don't miss these upcoming learning opportunities

October 11, Online Webcast - Maintain Build Cache Across Many Projects
October 12, Online Webcast - Improving Developer Experience with Build Scans
October 12, Industry Event - Workshop at NFJS Virginia
October 15-17, Industry Event - All Things Open
October 16-19, Industry Event - EclipseCon
October 17, Online Training - Incremental Builds and Build Caching
October 18, DPE Lowdown - How Apollo Kotlin does DPE with Develocity
October 18-19, Industry Event - DevOps World: Silicon Valley
October 18-19, Community Event - Basel One
October 19, Online Training - Managing Test Failures and Flakiness with Develocity
October 20, Online Training - Gradle Build Cache Deep Dive
October 20-21, Industry Event - NFJS: Minneapolis
October 24-25, Industry Event - BazelCon
October 25, Online Training - Maven Build Cache Deep Dive
October 26, Online Training - Gradle Build Tool Performance Optimization
October 26, Industry Event - DevOps World: Singapore
October 26-27, Industry Event - Droidcon London 2023
October 31, Online Training - Develocity for Productivity Engineers

Visit our website for the complete schedule of upcoming training and industry events.

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.