Llama 3.1 - Pivotal moment for Dev Productivity

In 2010, I watched a movie which gave a word to what I wanted to do in life. For context, I was a nerdy kid all through my school life and when I was just approaching high school, “Social network” inspired me to turn my calling of building something into a startup! I had an immense respect for Zuck, his journey and how he built such a large empire.

It took me twelve more years to finally take the leap and start my company in the summer of 2022. During those twelve years, I built numerous software solutions for companies of all sizes and led teams across India, Europe, and the US. Technology has changed so much, but one thing has remained constant throughout my career: there's too much friction in building software. Both builders and leaders often find themselves bogged down by firefighting and meetings, keeping them away from their primary goal—building tech.

Over the past few weeks our team at Middleware has been working on pretty exciting features built with LLMs?to make engineering leaders be productive and not busy. We got really excited with the launch of Llama 3.1 yesterday and how it could really benefit us being open source!

There I was - the same feeling of inspiration from Zuck. Though this time we’re building something great as well! There are 3 philosophical things with the Llama launch which really resonated with us at Middleware .

1. Going open source

Today most of the engineering teams globally are going through a big transformation - while some are operating as agile teams and some are becoming agile, the scrutiny on R&D costs has forced a lot of engineering teams to become efficient. To make matters exciting, the ever changing paradigm of AI has extended the product roadmaps. Hence, the engineering teams REALLY need something to improve their efficiency, delivery predictability and quality of the product.

In these times, DORA metrics has become the gold standard of code delivery metrics and hence a great starting point for any engineering team. We wanted to remove procurement barriers for the engineering teams while they’re starting their journey with DORA. Hence, we decided to go open source!

2. Data Security as a priority

Data sources like Github, Jira are super sensitive and enterprises might not be comfortable with trusting a new vendor when they want to start tracking metrics. So we made our core open source so that enterprises can setup DORA metrics wherever they want without data being sent out of their control.

3. Building a broader ecosystem

Engineering productivity is a deep issue and the journey to solve it has just started. It will require the community of engineering leaders, engineers contribute towards the a blameless, unbiased metrics framework and efficiency best practices.?

Being passionate builders ourselves(our team, Jayant Bhawal and I), we didn’t want to build just a product but remove friction from the lives of other builders like us as well. We realised that no essential tool in tech could gather a strong community support without being open source. The obvious examples being git and linux and how they became the standard source code management and OS respectively.

Open Source + AI is the path forward

We at Middleware truly believe that this wave of AI - LLMs are a game changer and looking forward to share updates in coming weeks about how we’re using LLM in Middleware open source to remove friction from software building

Let’s build something great together!