Developer Productivity Engineering Tour: Palo Alto
Join us in Menlo Park at the Meta HQ for an afternoon focused on Developer Productivity Engineering and Developer Experience, with talks from Meta and Microsoft with more to be announced soon!
Agenda
Meet leading Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) experts and turn your Developer Experience initiatives into a competitive advantage.
2:00 PM
Network
Join us for networking time before the event kicks off.
2:30 PM
2:45 PM
Nivedita Chopra
Until as recently as 2019, engineering teams at Meta had been struggling with project management as they didn’t have one recommended tool, and instead used 40+ different tools that were not integrated with the rest of the developer workflow. In this talk, we will share the details of these challenges, how a solution was designed to solve them, and the impact the new internal product (GSD – Get Stuff Done-) has had on developer productivity.
3:15 PM
Brian Houck
Software Engineering is about so much more than just coding. Developers juggle countless tasks, yet their actual workweeks rarely align with how they’d like to spend their time. This mismatch can lead to frustration, inefficiency, and burnout. In this talk, I’ll reveal findings from multiple large-scale studies on developer workflows, productivity peaks, and the impact of misaligned priorities. We’ll explore how time fragmentation, low-value tasks, and automation gaps shape the developer experience (and what organizations can do to fix it). From protecting focus time to leveraging AI for toil reduction, this session will provide actionable insights to help developers reclaim their time and maximize impact.
3:45 PM
Break
4:00 PM
Dhruva Juloori
At Uber’s scale, guaranteeing an always-green mainline while processing hundreds of changes per hour across diverse monorepos presented a significant challenge. In this talk, I’ll explore the design and evolution of MergeQueue—Uber’s innovative scheduling system that ensures mainline stability and production readiness for every commit. By harnessing speculative validation, build-time and change success predictions, and advanced conflict resolution strategies, MergeQueue delivers unmatched efficiency. It has reduced CI resource usage by approximately 53%, CPU usage by 44%, and P95 waiting times by 37%. These optimizations not only eliminate CI bottlenecks but also enable thousands of engineers to ship code rapidly and reliably, ensuring every commit is production-ready.
4:30 PM
Trisha Gee
Testing is a Good Thing, right? Especially automated testing. But “Good things come to those who wait” is not something that’s going to appeal to the busy developer. You want results, and you want them now. You’re in The Zone working on a problem, and the last thing you want is to break your flow wrestling with your testing framework or waiting for the tests to finish running. More code means more tests. More coverage means more tests. More tests mean more time. Time that you want to spend being productive, creative, innovative. How can you balance the need for quality with the need for speed? In this talk, Trisha will identify issues that slow down developers when writing, running and debugging tests, and look at tools that can help developers with each of these problems. There will be live coding, analysis of social media poll results, an overview of solutions in this space, “best practice” recommendations, and machine learning will be mentioned at some point.
5:00 PM
Network
Stick around to meet our speakers.
The Speakers
Speakers include expert DPE practitioners from some of the most innovative engineering organizations.
Brian Houck
Principal Productivity Engineer
Brian Houck is an Applied Scientist at Microsoft who specializes in increasing the well-being and productivity of internal engineering teams. His mission goes beyond metrics; it’s about humanizing the workplace. Through his research into tooling, processes, and cultural dynamics, Brian has successfully implemented strategies that not only boost efficiency but also foster a collaborative and satisfying work environment.
Brian takes a human-centered approach, focusing on improving the day-to-day experiences for developers. This philosophy has led to multiple company-wide initiatives and policies that have measurably enhanced team dynamics and productivity. His passion lies in exploring innovative ways to improve our work culture, ensuring that every individual feels valued, motivated, and productive.
Nivedita Chopra
Software Engineering Manager
Nivedita Chopra is an engineering manager at Meta, who has been building internal tools to improve the productivity of employees for the past 9 years. She was the technical lead for Meta’s Project Management tool (GSD – Get Stuff Done) and now supports the team building work management solutions for Meta.
Dhruva Juloori
Sr. Software Engineer
Dhruva Juloori is a Senior Software Engineer at Uber, specializing in Machine Learning and Algorithms. He is one of the key engineers behind Uber’s SubmitQueue, a transformative system that guarantees an always-green mainline at scale by handling hundreds of changes per hour across Uber’s diverse monorepos. Dhruva’s work empowers thousands of engineers to deliver high-quality code efficiently. His work focuses on building scalable distributed and ML systems that enhance developer productivity and streamline CI/CD processes.
Trisha Gee
Lead Technical Evangelist
Trisha is a software engineer, Java Champion and author. Trisha has developed Java applications for a range of industries of all sizes, including finance, manufacturing and non-profit, and she’s a lead developer advocate at Gradle. She has expertise in Java high-performance systems and dabbles with Open Source development.
Trisha’s exceptionally passionate about sharing things that help real developers. That might be: getting them up to speed on the latest version of Java; teaching them tips and tricks to improve their productivity; or promoting healthy technical communities across the globe. Trisha values helping all developers level up their career and skills at every step of their journey.
Read more from Trisha in the books “Head First Java”, “Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA”, “97 Things Every Java Developer Should Know” and “What to Look for in a Code Review”.