Productivity
Showing 18 out of 18 results
Tips to Prevent Burnout
Jérôme Petazzoni described burnout as the hardest refactor he's ever done. With growing demands from the industry to constantly deliver more, faster, we asked him for some tips that can help you avoid burning out.
Your Brain on Software Development
The brain encounters more complexity than it can possibly deal with in life, and it's evolved a rich set of heuristics to deal with the problem. Those heuristics are fantastically tuned for staying fed, not getting eaten by bears etc., but are they well-suited for designing software? This talk is for software engineers and architects alike, who are curious about how they make decisions, and how they think. It's threaded together from stories, personal experiences and otherwise, of systems that ended up a very strange shape, or were killed altogether, not through bad coding, but through humans collectively optimising for the wrong thing. Learn about the biases that affect our programming choices; how we favour the first solution we think of (Anchoring effect), are suspicious of things that were “Not Invented Here”, and just how difficult it is to change your worldview (the Backfire effect). Your Brain on Software Development is a whimsical talk that explores the intersection of Programming, Architecture and Psychology, through the medium of funny-in-retrospect memories, borrowed war stories, and attempts to avoid people swearing at my design choices 5 years later.
The Science of Sleep
Stress and insomnia are increasing. According to Sundhedsstyrelsen (Denmark's national health board), over 45 percent of Danes are bothered by varying degrees of sleep difficulties. Social pressure and high expectations can often lead to sleep issues. Sound familiar? Dr. Poul Jørgen Jennum, a professor of sleep diseases at the University of Copenhagen and chief physician and head of the the Danish Center for Sleep Medicine, will share his knowledge along with practical tips on how we can optimize our SleepOps.
Forget Velocity, Let's Talk Acceleration
Velocity gives us motion in one direction. We want to work faster -- and more, we want to do the most useful work. We need acceleration: deliberate changes in speed and direction. How? The same way we accelerate our customers' work: automation! We already automate our work: from CI to our favorite editors to command-line aliases, we smooth our workflow. We can take this farther -- but should we? Where is the balance between racing forward, and tweaking our racecar? To achieve this, first look closely at our own work. A few observations give us data on what's really slowing us down. It may not be the technical debt you think it is: what hurts us is different from what we dislike. Next consider automation: it changes more than our speed. Jessica suggests more powerful justifications, up to generating contributions larger than our own productivity. Let's find the sticking points in our work, and then apply our superpowers of automation to change our own world, so that we can change our users' worlds, faster.
40 Jenkins Features & Plugins You Wished You had Known about Before!
Did you know that an average Jenkins installation has around 100 plugins installed to build and deploy software? And more and more plugins are added every day? Together with the new features in the weekly releases, Jenkins attempts to stay current in a competitive Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tooling landscape. The downside of all these possibilities is that it is hard to wrap your head around what is possible with Jenkins and what are best practices. At a rate of 1 tip per minute I'll take you through some core and advanced features to successfully unleash the full potential of Jenkins in your CD process. Tips are applicable to both Jenkins novices and pros. So even if you know the differences between Declarative and Scripted Pipelines, you'll probably pick up some new tricks.
Why You Need a Software Delivery Machine
Many teams have a clear vision of how they want their software delivery to work. For example, what checks and staging deployments should occur on commits; what approval steps are required before promotion to production; what code needs to be included in new projects and what provisioning should occur on project creation; and what policies matter around license files and security scanning. But it’s hard to realize that vision. Typical challenges include: * Growing proliferation of services, meaning many delivery pipelines that can’t easily be changed as one, and many repositories with dependencies, configuration and usage practices getting dangerously out of date. * Bringing on new developers, due to lack of effective knowledge sharing and lack of automation * Creating new projects without copy/paste, leading to wasted effort and inconsistency * Lack of visibility into the whole elephant. What is deployed where? What is at what version? What is happening across the organization? Who should be informed in the case of a production alert, and to what code does it relate? The solution to these software problems is more software. These problems can best be addressed together, through greater automation, backed by a model spanning development and delivery. It’s what we call a software delivery machine.
Why You Need a Software Delivery Machine
Many teams have a clear vision of how they want their software delivery to work. For example, what checks and staging deployments should occur on commits; what approval steps are required before promotion to production; what code needs to be included in new projects and what provisioning should occur on project creation; and what policies matter around license files and security scanning. But it’s hard to realize that vision. Typical challenges include: * Growing proliferation of services, meaning many delivery pipelines that can’t easily be changed as one, and many repositories with dependencies, configuration and usage practices getting dangerously out of date. * Bringing on new developers, due to lack of effective knowledge sharing and lack of automation * Creating new projects without copy/paste, leading to wasted effort and inconsistency * Lack of visibility into the whole elephant. What is deployed where? What is at what version? What is happening across the organization? Who should be informed in the case of a production alert, and to what code does it relate? The solution to these software problems is more software. These problems can best be addressed together, through greater automation, backed by a model spanning development and delivery. It’s what we call a software delivery machine.
Bridging the Gap: How Data and Software Engineering Teams Can Work Together to Ensure Smooth Data Integrations
Imagine this scenario: The engineering team at your company is about to launch a new product or feature. The pressure is on the data team to deliver metrics and stats from the get-go, as everyone is keen to see how the new feature is performing. Behind the scenes, the data team is scrambling to understand how to connect to the new systems, transform the data, interpret it, and turn it into actionable insights. In this talk, I will walk the audience through the different steps necessary to ensure both data teams and software engineers are ready to integrate with a new production system and deliver correct and reliable analytics from day 1. I will cover topics such as infrastructure and data access considerations, data models, data flow and state changes, and data quality checks. I will also touch upon “data contracts”, a concept that’s been talked about a lot recently in the data space, and how these can be established to preserve consistent high-quality data integrations. Both data practitioners and software engineers will benefit from this talk and learn how to “bridge the gap” between the two worlds.
It's a Noisy World Out There
Most of us know how cognitive biases affect our decision making, thanks to the work of Daniel Kahneman and his important book Thinking Fast and Slow. Fewer of us know how noise affects our thinking. Noise here means the variability in inputs and cognitive processing we contend with when making individual and collective judgments. Noise comes from a variety of sources. We are affected by the time of day, the weather, if our favorite sports team just won or lost. One study found that judges in Louisiana gave harsher sentences to kids, especially black kids, in the week after the LSU college football team lost a game. Everyone is now focused on reducing bias, but in many cases, noise is a greater source of error than bias. Linda will introduce you to some surprising research about noise and decision making and offer suggestions for reducing noise. Note: if you reduce noise, you will also reduce bias. As Kahneman has said, "Wherever there is judgment, there is noise and more of it than you think."
One Rule to Rule Them All
As developers, we live under a constant barrage of helpful advice, often in the form of rules with cute names. We're told how to design, how to code, how to deploy, how to monitor: there are systems and rules for everything. How can we keep up? How can we know what's good advice, and what's bad? Over time I've come to realize that just about every good piece of advice is actually a special case of something both more general and simpler. So, let me introduce you to the "one rule to rule them all."
The Sociotechnical Path to High-Performing Teams
There is a yawning gap opening up between the best and the rest — the top few percent of elite engineering teams are making incredible gains year over year in velocity, reliability and productivity, and more teams are achieving elite status every year. Yet meanwhile the bottom 75% of teams are actually losing ground each year. Contrary to common belief, this has almost nothing to do with engineering ability, and everything to do with the sociotechnical feedback loops that are the beating heart of every engineering org. Great teams make great engineers. So let’s talk about how great teams are forged.
The Long History of DevOps Failures
Sociotechnical system theory emerged in the 1950s studying the impact of rapid changes in technology and social organization on British coal mining. The theory considers the interdependence of social and technical factors in the work and proposes that optimal organizational performance can only be achieved by systems that account for both. The research showed that considerable investments in automation did not necessarily result in increased productivity and often decreased both safety and morale. The empirical results showed that cross functional teams integrated and aligned with technology investments were more productive, more safe and more happy. And then what happened? This presentation will present a whimsical chronicle of research and anecdotes from British coal in the 50s to Serverless platforms of today highlighting how generations relearn and forget the same basic lessons. The audience should gain an increased understanding of the impact of work design on organizational performance with a focus on the complex and dynamic challenges of delivering software in the modern workplace.
Zero Trust is For Networks, Not Your Teams
The whole idea of DevOps was about how we could work together better. But we broke down silos, and instead built new walls. The concept of zero trust has been widely applied to network security, however, it’s not a great way to think about our teams. This talk will explore how to foster a culture of trust in organizations, with a focus on outcomes. Leaders and individuals alike play a critical role in establishing and maintaining trust, which is crucial for the success of any team. One key aspect of building a culture of trust is facilitating and growing psychological safety within the team. This means creating an environment where individuals feel comfortable expressing their opinions, ideas, and concerns without fear of negative consequences. Moreover, trust is necessary for proper practices of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps, but often organizations lack the right setup to allow for it. This talk will feature practices inspired from the field of Resilience Engineering as well as proven DevOps approaches, with a focus on how leaders and individuals can create an environment where trust is valued, encouraged, and fostered. Attendees will take away insights and actionable tips to bring back to their teams to create a more resilient and effective organization.
Is Software Engineering Real Engineering?
What makes software engineering different from “traditional” engineering? To find out, I interviewed 17 “crossovers”: people who have worked professionally as both a software and a traditional engineer. In aggregate, we learn three things: we are in fact engineers, we’re not actually that different as a field, and there’s a lot we can both teach and learn.
How to Reverse Software Entropy
Entropy is as much a phenomenon in software as it is in physics. Left to itself, software decays. Even if it's tended to by software people who care; unanticipated change in directions not originally foreseen or obsolescence of dependencies can cause software to rot. What can we do to stem this rot? In this talk, I'll explore some ways in which we can gradually improve the technical hygiene of the software we create. There may be no escaping laws of thermodynamics, however, we can take steps to contain and even reverse software entropy and make technical hygiene the norm.
More Buzzwords Won't Help: The Long History of DevOps Failures
Sociotechnical system theory emerged in the 1950s studying the impact of rapid changes in technology and social organization on British coal mining. The theory considers the interdependence of social and technical factors in the work and proposes that optimal organizational performance can only be achieved by systems that account for both. The research showed that considerable investments in automation did not necessarily result in increased productivity and often decreased both safety and morale. The empirical results showed that cross functional teams integrated and aligned with technology investments were more productive, more safe and more happy. And then what happened? This presentation will present a whimsical chronicle of research and anecdotes from British coal in the 50s to Serverless platforms of today highlighting how generations relearn and forget the same basic lessons. The audience should gain an increased understanding of the impact of work design on organizational performance with a focus on the complex and dynamic challenges of delivering software in the modern workplace.
Lunch & Roundtable Discussions
Don't miss your chance to share, learn, and network with speakers and attendees! Grab your lunch and join us at one of the roundtables. **Programming with AI** Dive into the future of software development with Alex Castrounis. Explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we code and solve problems. Join the discussion to gain insights and share your thoughts on AI-driven programming. **Technical debt** Address the challenges of technical debt and head-on with Saleem Siddiqui. Explore strategies for managing, reducing, and avoiding the pitfalls of accumulated software decay. Exchange tips and tricks with your peers in an informative discussion. **Culture & Productivity** Boost your team's productivity with Heidi Helfand and Charity Majors. Discuss the importance of cultivating a healthy work culture and the impact it has on your team's output. Learn from others and share your own experiences in this vital roundtable on workplace dynamics.
Shaping The Future of Developer Productivity with Backstage
The CNCF Landscape offers an incredible and diverse ecosystem of frameworks, technologies, and platforms. Your teams have their own implementations of these technologies. Onboarding new developers is super confusing, and docs are scattered around the place. In short: chaos and fragmentation in dozens of different tools. The solution to this might be… another portal? Backstage ([https://backstage.io](https://backstage.io/)), an open source platform you can use to build your own developer portal. It is highly customisable and adopted by companies like Unity, Netflix, American Airlines, and Epic Games. Lee will share the lessons learned and latest tips from the hundreds of Backstage adopters and thousands of contributors. Lee will dig into core features such as the Software Catalog and software templates that are changing the way users interact and manage their ecosystem.
