What is the happy path, for developers? It’s less boredom, and more play. Developer satisfaction, developer joy, and business results are strongly correlated. And yet – many of our jobs are frustrating, filled with friction, and free of joy. What’s going on? How do we fix that? Is annoying waste inevitable? Can developer performance be tuned? Are productivity measurements helping or hurting us? How do we deal with fear at work? Will AI take our jobs? Finally, how can you persuade management to invest in boredom? Holly is an expert on play at work, unwise automations, and polar bears. Trisha is an expert on performance tuning, tooling and productivity. Come to this talk to find out what these topics have in common.

It is well known that organizations connect software testing with software quality: making sure that the code does what it supposed to do.

Unfortunately, many organizations believe that testing is a slow process that causes stagnancy in the project. Organizations say that due to slow testing process they are not able to meet set milestones, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

The testing stage is also part of the developer experience, and making it such that engineers are productive and continue delivering software not only fast but with confidence is crucial.

In this talk, we will explore a few approaches that we are taking in order to deliver a more consistent and delightful testing experience for JVM engineers at Netflix. The end goal: speed up engineers’ feedback loop by running tests locally constantly as much as possible.

Measuring a developer’s productivity by the number of changes they make can be misleading: junior developers often work on less critical parts of the system while experienced developers work on key parts. We will discuss a better way to measure productivity using Software Supply Chain (SSC) networks and centrality measures like Katz centrality and PageRank. SSC is a network that shows the relationship between developers and the system’s components. By combining different factors into a single SSC and calculate each node’s centrality, helps in understanding the impact of a developer’s work better. We found that the number of changes a developer makes tends to level off over time. However, the importance of their work continues to grow though at a slower rate after the first year. So, SSC and centrality measures give us valuable insights into a developer’s work’s importance.

Developer experience is highly valued at Spotify, and they really understand the improvements it delivers to an organization.

In this talk, we will discover the journey Spotify has been through with Developer Experience, and how it has risen to be one of its most important values.

We will learn about Backstage, a developer portal that addresses and answers the friction a developer experiences everyday, and how it was donated to the open source and a community built around it. As well as understanding how Spotify utilises Backstage at scale, assisting the needs of thousands of developers on a daily basis.

American Airlines, the world’s largest airline, has been working on developer experience for many years to allow developers to work in more efficient ways through a delightful developer platform.

In 2020, they made the decision to have Backstage be the foundation of “Runway,” their developer platform and have grown a large plugin ecosystem around their expansive platform to enable delivery faster and safer.

In this talk, they will discuss their initial hackathon strategy, engaging the Backstage community, UX flow, templates, improving feedback loops, and much more.

By bringing together the pieces developers need to do their jobs, there is much less friction, developers spend more time writing code, and developer experience has improved.