Meet our next Showdown contestants, DPE University is now LIVE, how Netflix saves 250,000 dev hours a year, Spotify releases an advanced version of Backstage, upcoming DPE Tours and Summit, plus extra job openings. Need help? Email me at owhite@gradle.com, and have a productive month!
 

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

JUN-13: DPE Showdown on DevProd metrics challenges experts at Microsoft, Spotify, Uber, and DX

Wait, so the DPE Showdown is literally a bunch of DPE experts coming together in a game show format? 🤔 This you gotta see!  

 

One of the biggest topics from DPE Summit was how to best capture relevant and actionable metrics on productivity across large organizations. That's why we've invited five DPE experts to discuss and debate in this fun and interactive virtual event.

 

Discussion topics include: 

  • What are the top-level metrics for developer delight?

  • What’s the most surprising thing you've learned about DPE?

  • How do you measure the impact of AI on DPE?

  • How do you justify the value of DPE/DevEx to executive leadership?

  • At what team size does it pay off to start focusing on DevEx/productivity?

  • DORA vs. SPACE vs. DevEx vs. something else—how do you know what’s right for your organization?

  • What's the right balance between a qualitative vs. quantitative approach?

See what they have to say, and then vote for the best advice given. Register today to save your spot!

 
Register for JUN-13

INDUSTRY NEWS

Introducing DPE University

DPE University is now live! 

 

You can now access 10 free, self-paced courses on Gradle, Apache Maven, Develocity, and DPE, with more courses to come.

 

Courses are presented by the Gradle training team, including Java Champions Trisha Gee, Brian Demers, and Baruch Sadogursky. Join hundreds of learners and start your developer productivity journey today. 

 

P.S. All learning paths provide certificates upon completion so you can share your achievements! 

 

 
Explore DPE University courses

DPE DATA POINT

What Netflix did to get back 250,000 developer hours per year

Not only one of the world’s most popular brands, Netflix is also much admired in the software development industry for their OSS contributions and leadership in the space. So how does Netflix cut build and test times in order to give back a quarter of a million developer hours per year?

 
Learn more

BEST PRACTICES

Spotify releases private beta of an even more prescriptive Backstage IDP

Every new tool has its own learning curve and associated overhead. Despite over 4 million developers adopting Backstage—the IDP that Spotify contributed to the CNCF—it seems that many teams still struggle to adopt and deploy the industry's most popular IDP at scale. 

 

Mike Vizard, writing on DevOps.com, shares Spotify's recent release of the private beta of Spotify Portal for Backstage, which provides enterprise support and integrations with popular tools like Snyk, Datadog, Atlassian, and New Relic.

 

This new guard-railed approach aims to further boost developer productivity and developer onboarding efforts. We’ll continue to track improvements to IDPs on offer—it's an exciting time for developer productivity solutions!

 
Get the Lowdown on Backstage

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENTS

DPE Tour includes upcoming stops in Berlin, Boston, London, and Washington D.C.—with the full DPE Summit returning to San Francisco Sept 24-25.

By now, you’re probably aware that our DPE Tour circuit has been visiting cities in the USA and is expanding to Europe in June. If you’re in the area, join DPE and DevEx experts from some of the world’s most exciting companies during these half-day, in-person events—featuring free drinks, food, and hallway chats, followed by a Happy Hour either on-site or at a nearby venue.

Also, if you’re planning to attend DPE Summit Sep 24-25 in San Francisco, now is the time to secure your Early-Bird ticket rate of $249. Stay tuned for more Summit updates.


P.S. We just announced a new DPE Lowdown on July 11, featuring Red Hat discussing how their Quarkus team reduced their highly complex Maven build times by 3X using their free OSS Develocity instance. Don’t miss this fascinating story! 

 
Dive into everything DPE on dpe.org

IDEAS & INSIGHTS

New Platform Engineering survey shows (perhaps overly)
broad adoption, with 75% of respondents using 3 or more IDPs  

Appearing in The New Stack, Puppet (by Perforce) has released their latest 2024 State of DevOps Report, which looks at Platform Engineering adoption over the last 3 years. With only 467 responses, it's possible of course that this self-selecting population doesn't accurately represent the industry at large. However, it certainly shows where the Early Adopters are heading.  

 

The survey reveals interesting points, such as:

  • 65% of organizations consider their Platform Engineering teams worth the investment

  • The #1 benefit of Platform Engineering is "Improves efficiency/productivity of my work"

  • Where platform teams are located within the organization is split fairly evenly across 1) as a separate team under engineering, 2) within operations teams, and 3) within engineering teams

What we find interesting is the question of whether 3 or 5 or 10 IDPs might be too much of a good thing. What kinds of productivity solutions are actually considered IDPs? How often does overlapping functionality appear across various IDPs in place?

 
Read the article

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.
Summit talk) covering how 17 companies implement DPE tools and practices. Whether you are small, medium, or large, there are examples of DPE structures, terminology, and practices for comparison:

 

Google

  • Size: Large, 100,000 developers 

  • Terminology used:  Engineering Productivity, Developer Intelligence

  • What they measure: Speed, Ease, Quality 

LinkedIn

  • Size: Medium, 10,000 developers 

  • Terminology used:  Productivity and Happiness, Developer Insights, Developer Experience Index

  • What they measure: Developer Net User Satisfaction (NSAT), Developer Build Time, Code Reviewer Response Time, Post-Commit CI Speed, CI Determinism, Deployment Success Rate 

Peloton 

  • Size: Small, 3,000 developers

  • Terminology used:  Tech Enablement, Developer Experience 

  • What they measure: Engagement, Velocity, Quality, Stability

The article contains more details naturally, but the main takeaways conclude that “DORA and SPACE metrics are used selectively” (mainly by Microsoft, the author of the SPACE framework), that qualitative metrics measuring the developer experience itself are frequently used, and that the cognitive load of regular interruptions is highly detrimental to developer “focus time”, a metric tracked more widely than originally expected.

 

See how your team’s DPE initiatives compare

DPE QUIZ

Which of the following is NOT a focus of Developer Productivity Engineering tools and practices?

a) Internal developer surveys

b) Failure analytics dashboards

c) Lines of code written over time

d) Build caching to eliminate extra work

e) Test distribution to speed up tests

 

p.s. answer is at the bottom of this page

 

EXPERT TAKES

Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Spotify share how they’re measuring developer productivity

You may recall that last month we published all the videos and slides from DPE Summit 2023. But with over 40 presentations available to explore, where should you start? 

 

Well, one topic that comes up again and again within software organizations—and was therefore a common discussion point at DPE Summit—is how to effectively measure developer productivity. Is it DORA? Is it internal surveys? Is it custom dashboards? Or something else entirely? 

 

In the section above we saw Gergely Orosz break this down, but to learn exactly how Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Spotify tackle the challenges of DPE metrics, check out these videos: 

So if you missed DPE Summit 2023, watch these videos and stay tuned for announcements about DPE Summit 2024, which will take place September 24-25, 2024 in San Francisco. Event registration opens soon…

 
Watch DPE Summit 2023 sessions

INDUSTRY NEWS

Red Hat doubles down on IDPs, introducing a new developer platform based on Spotify's Backstage

The old saying used to go “No one gets fired for buying IBM”. Now that Big Blue and Red Hat joined forces, is it fair to say that where Red Hat goes the software industry will follow?

 

It depends. 

 

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are proving to be increasingly valuable for not only developer productivity but also developer onboarding. In his recent DPE Summit talk, Lee Mills revealed that Backstage users at Spotify have reduced their “time to 10th PR” for new hires from 66 days to 22 days and that Backstage users are 2.3x more active on GitHub than non-users.

 

Red Hat is not an organization to miss an opportunity like this—they describe their new Developer Hub as designed to “provide IT organizations with an extensible instance of Backstage for Kubernetes environments to improve developer productivity”.

 

While it’s clearly meant as an on-ramp for Red Hat products like OpenShift, Quarkus, and Ansible, this showcases the extensibility and customizations possible using Backstage as a flexible foundation for developer productivity initiatives. 

 

Red Hat promoting and contributing to a product like Backstage is a good sign, and we’re interested to see what kind of uptake it gets among users. Read the full article by Mike Vizard for more details.

 
Read the article

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:

c) Lines of code written over time

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