The Developer Productivity Engineer - August 2024

BEST PRACTICES

How Netflix detects and responds to build performance regressions (and the code to get it done)

Even Netflix—a company famous for its engineering innovation and open-source tools—faces continual challenges with build performance regressions.

The Android team at Netflix says these regressions happen regularly, often significantly impacting CI and local developer machine build times. For example, a build cache miss can easily turn a 15-min average build time into a 45-min quagmire with no explanation.

This is obviously bad for developer productivity. This blog post, authored by Netflix and Gradle, details their observability solution using Develocity’s Build Validation Scripts and quick investigation Build Scan® links. By setting up an hourly CI job that detects build-time regressions, Netflix gets automatically notified on Slack—along with details from the related Build Scan®—when the CI job finds increased build times or cache misses. 

See how they did it, and learn how to implement this strategy for your own team.

Read the story

FEATURED UPCOMING EVENT

See the agenda, and last chance to get tickets!

This is the last chance to get tickets to DPE Summit—September 24-25 in San Francisco. Brought to you by Gradle and sponsored by Intuit, JetBrains, Meta, Netflix, and Uber, we’ve got an impressive lineup of expert speakers (if you’re still not convinced!)

DPE Summit 2024 details

INDUSTRY NEWS

Developer burnout: the trillion dollar problem

Could overwork, context-switching, too many tools, and scope creep be responsible for $1 trillion in enterprise losses each year?

This ITPro article surfaces findings from the "State of Developer Experience" report by Harness, which suggests that burnout is a major reason developers leave their jobs. The result? As much as $1 trillion a year is lost. Here are some of the data points:

• Over 50% of developers cited burnout as a reason their peers are leaving their jobs 
• 45% said they don’t have enough time for learning and development
• 54% said it takes longer than a week to learn new tools
• 97% said they context switch because their tools are from multiple vendors
• 62% experience ‘scope creep’, with expanding requirements meaning that they're taking on more, with less confidence that they can achieve what's required

Echoing and expanding upon the topic is this SD Times podcast featuring a Q&A with Jellyfish CEO Andrew Lau, whose company released a report showing that 65% of developers experienced burnout in the last year. Their findings indicate that burnout is led by constant change, economic uncertainty, and the need to keep up with new technologies—as well as the stress of engineering teams having an increased influence on business strategy.

While COVID, Zoom fatigue, and economic factors are outside of our control, Develocity can certainly do something about context switching and developer productivity as a solution to cognitive fatigue and burnout. 

Learn more

DPE SUCCESS STORY

How Pinterest leverages Honeycomb to maximize the value of Develocity data 

The Mobile Builds team at Pinterest describes how they use Honeycomb to leverage the wealth of data inside Develocity. By using the Develocity API, Pinterest extracts actionable insights into their builds, helping them identify and resolve inefficiencies faster. 

Read more

DPE VIDEOS

Too hot to play outside? Catch up on DPE videos!

If you’re staying indoors during record-breaking heat across the globe, why not learn from DPE experts? Check out these recent interviews and presentations: 

• Build Propulsion Lab interview with Trisha Gee (Gradle) and Holly Cummins (Red Hat) - Trisha interviews Holly about the journey of using Develocity to accelerate Quarkus builds, whether developer productivity and developer joy are opposites, and how helpful AI is for developers.
• DPE Showdown on Developer Productivity Metrics - DPE experts from DX, Microsoft, Spotify, and Uber discuss what metrics have the highest-impact DPE outcomes across thousands of source repositories and developers.
• DPE Lowdown on Quarkus and Maven - Red Hat’s Guillaume Smet shares the Quarkus project team’s journey to faster and more stable builds using Develocity’s Maven build cache. The results include reducing a 4-hour CI build to just over 60 minutes.

More Gradle videos

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