Track: Developer Experience: Level up Your Engineering Effectiveness

Location: Broadway Ballroom South Center, 6th fl.

Day of week: Tuesday

A software engineering organization is most useful to the business when its time is totally focused on the art and science of building great software products and services. Developer Experience is about maximizing that effectiveness by simplifying the process of developing, deploying, operating and supporting software. Practices like Continuous Delivery are a great step in that direction, but we need to also succeed in many other areas. We will explore tools and techniques to manage cross-platform environments, evaluate detailed insights into these systems and study lessons learned with the intricacies of managing complex test environments.

Track Host:
Sangeeta Narayanan
Director of Engineering @Netflix

Sangeeta leads the Edge Developer Experience team at Netflix, whose mission is to ensure that engineers are focused on providing the best possible video streaming experience for millions of people around the world. She and her team accomplish this by building world class tools to enable a simplified developer experience and enhanced operational visibility at cloud scale. Sangeeta has held varying roles at companies large and small, including Test Engineering, Sales Engineering, Consulting and Leadership. Her passion for simplifying the process of developing and operating software has been the common theme across all those experiences.

Trackhost Interview

Question: 
QCon: What’s the motivation for your track?
Answer: 

Sangeeta: Over the past few years, architectural patterns and practices like microservices, serverless and DevOps have revolutionized the way we work in the software industry. They have enabled organizations to move rapidly and handle ever-increasing scalability challenges in their systems. While there is no question as to the benefits of these concepts, there is a real danger of engineers spending more energies in the process of delivering functionality and keeping the lights on as opposed to generating value for their businesses. Having experience first hand the benefits of simplifying some of these processes and the pitfalls of not doing so (in the form of burnout, lost productivity and bugs), I have one mission for my team - to ensure that Netflix engineers spend the bulk of their energies on building the best-in-class online streaming experience for our customers. I'm always interested in newer and better ways of working towards that mission, which is what I hope to share with attendees.

Question: 
QCon: What’s the level & core persona?
Answer: 

Sangeeta: Anyone with an interest in wanting to ship software quickly and reliably will derive value from these talks - development and ops engineers, architects and technical managers. They assume some familiarity with microservices and cloud technologies, but most of the approaches should be broadly applicable.

Question: 
QCon: What 3 actionable things do you want persona to walk away with?
Answer: 

Sangeeta: My biggest hope is to spark ideas and encourage attendees to challenge status quo in their organizations in a quest to find ways to improve their velocity while maintaining reliability. A few specifics they can expect to learn:

  • How to apply a combination of architectural patterns, technical and organizational tools and practices to build and maintain high performing teams
  • How to design for testability and operability - these considerations are critical in the long run, but hard to bolt on later
  • Identify potential areas of friction such server provisioning or application bootstrapping and draw inspiration from others who have addressed them
Question: 
QCon: What's new here and how is this different from DevOps?
Answer: 

Sangeeta: My view is that DevEx encompasses everything involved in the process of developing and shipping software, which includes DevOps and much more. Given the way in which we build software today, that covers everything from developer tools like IDEs, API discovery and explorer frameworks, bootstrapping projects, testing solutions, operations, support, education and even organizational practices. Devops practices like CI/CD and architectural patterns like microservices are certainly a key part of the story, but here we take a more holistic view of the entire software lifecycle.

10:35am - 11:25am

by Adrian Trenaman
SVP Engineering, HBC Digital / Gilt & Committer Apache Karaf

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,...

11:50am - 12:40pm

by Tim Bozarth
Director of Engineering @Netflix

The fabric of Netflix's approach to building new highly-available services is evolving. The Runtime Platform Team is focused on improving developer productivity while simultaneously making it simpler to build and maintain the high-availability services that Netflix expects. Starting with application generation, and leveraging a new approach to communication between services (RPC), we're simplifying what's needed to build a fast, reliable, and optimized service capable of delivering a...

1:40pm - 2:30pm

Open Space
2:55pm - 3:45pm

by James Wen
Site Reliability Engineer @Spotify

Spotify is currently one of the most popular music streaming services in the world with over 100 million monthly active users. At Spotify, a team of 6 engineers maintains the machine provisioning and capacity fleet for all 150+ Spotify teams. This talk is going to tell the story of how Spotify’s infrastructure evolved from teams owning and doting on groups of long-running servers to a distinctive separation of business code and value from the underlying ephemeral machines all of Spotify's...

4:10pm - 5:00pm

by Michael Bryzek
Cofounder & CTO @Flow.io., previously Co-Founder & CTO @Gilt

A major part of our lives is working safely with production - yet few organizations today are designing production to enable higher quality and end to end verification of the code we write and deploy. In this talk, we build on the foundation of great microservice architectures to include the first class design of testability as one of the most important artifacts that high velocity and high-quality teams should consider. In particular, we’ll explore what it’s like to build quality software...

5:25pm - 6:15pm

by Erich Ess
Software Engineer @Jet, previous CTO

One of the biggest challenges of working with distributed systems (even small ones with only 10 services) is maintaining them once they're live and performing triage of major issues and returning systems back to health as quickly as possible. This creates a key need for a good developer experience with complex systems: how to minimize the amount of time spent awake at 2am in order to achieve Return To Service. Having a good experience for developers is founded upon how the distributed system...

Tracks

Monday, 26 June

Tuesday, 27 June

Wednesday, 28 June