The Developer Productivity Engineer - February 2025

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

?? Feb-27 webinar - “Observing build and CI productivity in your favorite OSS projects"

If you use Spring Framework, JUnit Platform, Testcontainers, or Hibernate, then you're using open-source software that leverages Develocity for accelerated builds/tests and observability into failures, flaky tests, performance regressions, and more.

We're proud to sponsor free (public) instances of Develocity for over 20 well-known open-source projects, including those from the Apache Software Foundation, Spring Framework, Commonhaus Foundation, Micronaut Foundation, Kotlin Foundation, Scala Center, and many more.

In this webinar with Ga?per Kojek, Solutions Engineer at Gradle, we'll review surprising insights gained from the data from over 50,000 OSS project builds per week.

Register here

INDUSTRY NEWS

?? Develocity wins InfoWorld 2024 Technology of the Year Award!

We are happy to be honored with an award from InfoWorld (for the second year in a row) for Develocity in the “DevOps: Productivity” category. According to the judges:

“Develocity continues to be impactful in improving developer productivity so that features can be delivered to market quickly. Analytics and other dashboards provide insights into where the bottlenecks are across all systems.”

Thanks to everyone who supported us!

Read more

DPE SUMMIT AND TOURS

??Mar-25: Our DPE Tour heads to Meta HQ in Palo Alto!

Our next stop on the DPE City Tour heads to Meta’s HQ in Menlo Park on March 25. Join? Nivedita Chopra from Meta, Brian Houck from Microsoft, Dhruva Juloori from Uber and Trisha Gee from Gradle to learn about DPE insights and best practices at top software companies.

Spots are limited, so register now to save your seat!?

We’ve also confirmed the dates and the early-sign up form for DPE Summit 2025 in San Francisco this September 23-24. Be the first to know when we announce tickets by signing up…and in the meantime, we encourage you to revisit talks from the last few years to learn from DPE and DX thought leaders!

Register for Mar-25

IDEAS & INSIGHTS

The story behind Netflix rolling out service-level prioritized load shedding to improve resiliency

Develocity customer Netflix is an outspoken leader of DPE practices in the software industry—see their DPE Summit talks here, here, here, and here—and it's always interesting to see stories about how they work to optimize their UX.?

In this article on InfoQ, author Rafal Gancarz describes how Netflix optimized load shedding to differentiate between critical and non-critical requests in order to boost resilience and UX.?

As described, Netflix implemented prioritized load shedding at the service level, building upon their existing API Gateway solution. This allows services to selectively shed non-critical, pre-fetch requests during traffic spikes, protecting user-initiated requests crucial for a smooth viewing experience.?

This approach optimizes cloud capacity, avoiding the expense and operational overhead of separate clusters for different request types. By prioritizing requests at the service level, Netflix efficiently manages load and maintains availability without sacrificing user experience. Read the article, and check out their Develocity story!?

Netflix Case Study?

DPE UNIVERSITY

Featured course: “Gradle Build Cache Deep Dive”

This month's featured course on DPE University is Gradle Build Cache Deep Dive.?

For advanced Gradle users who are familiar with Gradle Build Cache, this 120-minute, six-section course dives deeper into how to enable build caching for tasks you author, along with techniques to debug build caching issues.?

Upon completion, you’ll receive a certificate of accomplishment. The first 5 people that send a screenshot of their certificate to [email protected] will get a personalized shout-out on LinkedIn or X/Twitter. I’m waiting! :-)?

Get started

BEST PRACTICES

Continuously Improving Developer Productivity at Snowflake

Our friends at Snowflake recently published a blog post outlining their approach to DevProd.?

The storyline is familiar to many of us: boosted by market success, their codebase rapidly grew to accompany an increasing feature list. This led to playing catch up when it came to test coverage, infrastructure support at scale, and, importantly, increasing build and test times.?

Here are some especially poignant DPE tips and practices included in their strategy:

• “Our customers are discerning Snowflake engineers. In order to earn their trust and build the virtuous cycle of feedback and iteration, we need to demonstrate that we 1) understand their experiences, 2) are making steady progress and 3) reprioritize and iterate based on their feedback.”
• "We [treat] developer tools like a customer-facing product with published service-level agreements. We demonstrated accountability in weekly emails and biweekly updates in product all-hands. Transparency helps build customer trust and keeps feedback flowing."

By focusing on leadership priority, measurement, customer connection and accountability, Snowflake was able to turn things around…read the full post for the details, and learn more about how slow builds and tests affect the developer productivity of your organization.

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tags: #Java #developerproductivity #developerexperience #softwaredevelopment #platformengineering #Android #Maven #Gradle #Develocity #softwareengineering #platformengineering #DevProd #DevEx #DPE #Observability