Hi, this is Oliver at Gradle. I want to introduce myself as the new DPE newsletter editor. You will notice that we have refreshed the look, feel, and personality (me!) of the newsletter for 2024. We hope you like it. Email me at owhite@gradle.com if you have any feedback about any of the content. In this issue, I want to highlight the upcoming DevProdEng Lowdown with OpenRewrite because it’s happening on Jan-31, so register ASAP to reserve your space.

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

Jan-31  |  DPE Lowdown - Scaling DPE Deployments with OpenRewrite and Develocity

“Developer productivity efforts that cannot scale are doomed to languish in darkness.”
- old Klingon proverb

 

Kidding, of course! The Klingons probably never said that...yet the words ring true.

 

Join our next DevProdEng Lowdown—featuring the founder and CEO of Moderne—to learn how OpenRewrite leveraged its popular OSS tool to deploy DPE at scale.  

 

OpenRewrite analyzes code and applies “recipes” to change code in a reliable way to facilitate framework migrations. Collaborating with Gradle, they also found it to be a great tool for facilitating DPE deployments at scale. The Develocity configuration recipe enables large organizations with thousands of source repositories to easily add this configuration to multiple Gradle and Maven projects in one go. Develocity Failure Analytics can then be used to identify misconfigurations for immediate remediation. 

 

Get the more detailed story behind this successful collaboration and learn some best practices around deploying DPE at scale.

 
Join the Lowdown

INDUSTRY NEWS

LinkedIn's DPE organization open-sources their Developer Productivity and Happiness framework 

Have you ever heard of Apache Kafka, Apache Samza, or Apache Pinot? These all started as internal tooling built at LinkedIn.

 

LinkedIn has a long history of open-sourcing internally developed software. Now, well-known DPE luminary Max Kanat-Alexander from LinkedIn has announced they are open-sourcing their Developer Productivity and Happiness (DPH) framework. This framework represents a comprehensive guide and set of practices that LinkedIn's DPE teams have incorporated into their process—with proven gains.

 

Available on GitHub, it covers developer personas and champions; insights derived from quantitative and qualitative data; and their philosophy on goals, signals, and metrics, including their view on which metrics have contributed most to their success. If this sounds interesting, then you should get to know Max better with his ironic DPE Summit 2023 keynote…

 
Watch Max’s Keynote

EXPERT TAKES

All 41 talks from DPE Summit 2023 are now available

DPE Summit 2023 was sold-out, so in case you missed the event (never fear—DPE Summit 2024 is in the works), we've just released the presentation videos, slides, and related resources.

 

"But wait," you're thinking. "I don't have 20 hours to watch all that..."

 

That's why we’ve provided the slides alongside the recordings so you can quickly click through and decide where to dig in. The only question that remains is whether to watch a talk by: 

  • Apple or Airbnb…

  • Google or Gradle… 

  • JPMorgan Chase or JetBrains… 

  • Spotify or Slack…

…or from the other 15 leading software organizations. We think you get the picture. Grab some popcorn (or a coffee) and take a look!

 
Watch DPE Summit 2023 sessions

BEST PRACTICES

Developer Productivity trends for 2024 see strong gains in platform engineering, IDPs, and AI, while the debate over metrics continues

The New Stack has covered developer productivity and developer experience extensively over the last few years. Their latest article looking at the future of DPE in 2024 is worth a look. Specifically, author Jennifer Higgins covers the following broad topics while providing sourced data points and references for additional context and learning. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Vibrancy in Platform Engineering - Platform engineering tools like the Internal Developer Portal (IDP) gain mass adoption, how different types of developer productivity teams relate to the overall SLDC, and a look at the survey data supporting the growth platform engineering investment.

  • Organizational investment in DevProd - Survey results reveal developer productivity and developer experience teams typically make up between 11% and 19% of the developer workforce, depending on team size (the smaller the team the larger the percent). As an industry, we're still learning how to optimally size developer productivity teams. 

  • Continued debate over metrics - The now infamous McKinsey take on measuring developer productivity has been countered by alternative opinions published on the ACM and IEEE. The sensible approach to navigating these somewhat muddy waters is to engage developers directly to best understand their needs.

  • Generative AI, developer context, and co-pilots - GitHub Co-Pilot, Google's Duet AI, and Atlassian's AI for JIRA and Confluence, among other AI-assisted tools, have begun to tap into the individual developer experience. This is in contrast to platform engineering which seeks to influence broader organizational goals. These AI solutions currently have significant faults—for example, code produced by ChatGPT is unacceptable over half the time. While AI tools continue to improve, and most believe they’ll evolve to support the entire SDLC, the greatest current benefit is in accelerating new employee onboarding alongside developer platforms.

 
Read the article on The New Stack
 

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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