Presentation: Removing Friction In the Developer Experience
Abstract
Our ability to be productive engineers can be distilled to the sum of two forces: things that motivate us, and -things that hold us back. While the levers of autonomy, mastery and purpose and their effect on motivation are well popularised, engineering organisations are often held back by different forms of friction. We’ll discuss how we’ve applied a potent blend of microservice / serverless architectures, continuous deployment, and cloud technology to make it easy to push code swiftly, safely and frequently and operate it reliably in production . And, we’ll discuss the organisational tools like team self-selection, team ingredients model, voluntary adoption, internal startups that allow us to decentralise and decouple high-performing teams.
HBC Digital is the tech team behind the luxury experience at saks.com, saksoff5th.com, gilt.com, lordandtaylor.com and thebay.com.
Interview
Adrian: Share the learnings of rolling out startup-style dev-ex in a large, corporate engineering organisation.
Adrian: Engineers, team leads, CTOs.
- Autonomy, mastery and purpose are necessary but sufficient for great devex. You need to ruthlessly identify and remove the processes and architectures that stop you from getting change swiftly, safely and frequently to production.
- Stop wasting your time in the 'theatre' of staging and QA environments. Adopt techniques that allow you to test safely in production.
- Adopt devops principals so that your engineers own their code in production.
Adrian: It's hard to change an existing architecture or organisation: change often meets resistance and that resistance can be overwhelming. Instead of trying to boil the ocean, why not simply draw a line around the existing system and practices of the organisation and say 'okay, everything outside this box is new, and in this new space we're going to think and act differently'. If you can show that these new techniques work, then folk within the box will want to adopt them and you'll get a natural shift to better devex.
Similar Talks
Tracks
Monday, 26 June
-
Microservices: Patterns & Practices
Practical experiences and lessons with Microservices.
-
Java - Propelling the Ecosystem Forward
Lessons from Java 8, prepping for Java 9, and looking ahead at Java 10. Innovators in Java.
-
High Velocity Dev Teams
Working Smarter as a team. Improving value delivery of engineers. Lean and Agile principles.
-
Modern Browser-Based Apps
Reactive, cross platform, progressive - webapp tech today.
-
Innovations in Fintech
Technology, tools and techniques supporting modern financial services.
Tuesday, 27 June
-
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Case studies from the most relevant names in software.
-
Developer Experience: Level up Your Engineering Effectiveness
Trends, tools and projects that we're using to maximally empower your developers.
-
Chaos & Resilience
Failures, edge cases and how we're embracing them.
-
Stream Processing at Large
Rapidly moving data at scale.
-
Building Security Infrastructure
How our industry is being attacked and what you can do about it.
Wednesday, 28 June
-
Next Gen APIs: Designs, Protocols, and Evolution
Practical deep-dives into public and internal API design, tooling and techniques for evolving them, and binary and graph-based protocols.
-
Immutable Infrastructures: Orchestration, Serverless, and More
What's next in infrastructure. How cloud function like lambda are making their way into production.
-
Machine Learning 2.0
Machine Learning 2.0, Deep Learning & Deep Learning Datasets.
-
Modern CS in the Real World
Applied, practical, & real-world dive into industry adoption of modern CS.
-
Optimizing Yourself
Maximizing your impact as an engineer, as a leader, and as a person.
-
Ask Me Anything (AMA)