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How Platform Engineering Helps in Developer Productivity

Are you tired of your development team spending countless hours on repetitive tasks instead of focusing on innovation? Are you looking for a solution that can boost their productivity while reducing business costs? Look no further than platform engineering! In this blog post, we will explore how platform engineering revolutionizes the way developers work, enabling them to unleash their full potential and create amazing products. Join us as we witness increased efficiency, reduced downtime, and a significant drop in operational expenses through platform engineering for both developers and businesses alike.

Introduction to Platform Engineering

Platform engineering is not a new concept in terms of what developers have been building for end-consumers or teams creating products for developers, such as Postman and GitHub. However, in recent years, this term has become more associated with teams building platforms for internal use, bridging gaps within organizations.

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How To Measure Developer Productivity

Three primary methods for measuring team productivity are the SPACE framework, DORA metrics, and Goals/Signals/Metrics (GSM).

The SPACE Framework for Team Productivity

In a recent research paper by Nicole Forsgren and her colleagues, “The SPACE of Developer Productivity" (2021.), the authors defined a framework as a systematic approach to measuring, understanding, and optimizing engineering productivity. It encourages leaders to take a comprehensive approach to productivity, communicating measurements with one another and connecting them to team objectives. The five aspects are used to categorize engineering productivity, called the Space Framework.

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The SPACE Framework for Developer Productivity

Welcome to SPACE

Developer productivity is a complex subject for which there is no magic bullet. However, economic pressure, increased market competition, and shorter delivery circles force many organizations to improve their efficiency and open up new models of operations. Measuring, maintaining, and eventually improving engineering productivity in an increasingly hybrid workplace are important discussions many organizations are having right now. 

As a result there are more and more companies investigating how to do more with the resources they have, how to remove bottlenecks in their processes and how to enable developers to be productive. Empirical evidence and understanding of productivity drivers are forming at the same time as some myths and misconceptions are getting debunked.

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How to Overcome “The Great Resignation” at Your Company [Webinar Sign-up]

If you're working to hire developers in today's market, congratulations, you are now the candidate! With 500,000 job openings for software developers in the U.S. alone, you're in a tough hiring market. "The Great Resignation" is being used to describe this turbulence in the market and every day you run the risk of missing your software delivery plans based on empty seats and disengaged developers. Every company has reevaluated how they are attracting and retaining their developers to compete in this post-pandemic market and are making changes to how they operate their teams. 

Join us on December 10th, and we'll look at the current market trends for the developer hiring market and give both leaders and developers practical steps that they can take to attract new developers and keep the ones they have in the year ahead. You'll learn:

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Software Engineering Best Practices That High-Performing Teams Follow

Maybe you're a newbie dev, in a coding academy, or newly graduated. Or perhaps you're old and cynical like me. The reality is, tech moves fast, and it's easy to get distracted by the latest software, tool, or trend.

But while you're floating in YouTube videos, Reddit boards, and StackOverflow, we've got something to keep you anchored: the good coding practices in software engineering. I've deliberately approached this article with broad strokes to move a little beyond the typical laundry list. Let's take a look at the software engineering best practices that high-performing teams follow.

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Markdown autodocs: Automation From External or Remote Files

Why Markdown-autodocs

To make your repo more appealing and useful, you need to provide example code snippets in your README.md. It would be inefficient and time-consuming to manually copy and paste each code snippet in its respective place in your README.

This problem can be solved using Markdown-autodocs: a GitHub Action that automatically generates and updates markdown content (like your README.md) from external or remote files. You will need to add markers in your README.md that will tell markdown-autodocs where to insert the code snippet.

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10 Must-Have VS Code Extensions to Improve Your Productivity

1. Live Server

Live Server allows you to see code changes reflected in the browser. It launches a local development server with a live reload feature both for static and dynamic pages.

Every time you save your code, you'll instantly see the changes reflected in the browser. You'll be much faster at spotting errors and it's much easier to do some quick experiments with your code.

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Evolution of the Quarkus Developer Experience

Introduction

Since its inception, Quarkus has focused on more than just delivering sets of features. Developer productivity and joy have been critical components of Quarkus. The developer experience and how to improve it are carefully considered with every new feature added. This article showcases the maturity and evolution of developer productivity capabilities within Quarkus from inception to the newly-released version 2.0.

Developer Productivity and Joy

Quarkus rests on a vast ecosystem of technologies, standards, libraries, and APIs, making Quarkus “familiar” but “new”. Developers don’t have to spend lots of time learning an entirely new set of APIs and technologies to take advantage of the benefits Quarkus brings to the JVM or native images. Instead, developers can utilize their existing knowledge and skills. Among the specifications and technologies underlying Quarkus are Eclipse MicroProfile, Eclipse Vert.x, Contexts & Dependency Injection (CDI), JAX-RS, the Java Persistence API (JPA), the Java Transaction API  (JTA), Apache Camel, and Hibernate, just to name a few.

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Problem: Spreadsheets. Solution: Specifications

In Analysis

Business Analyst vs Developer

A business analyst and a developer may have different objectives and perspectives
Here’s an example of a conversation that you may have been part of sometime in your life as a developer.
  • Business Analyst: Our next user story involves creating an API (let’s call it “Customer API”).
  • Developer A: How novel! That’s what I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that.
  • Business Analyst: Great, should I let the clients know that it wouldn’t take as long to build it?
  • Developer A: Hold on. We haven’t even heard the requirements for Customer API.
  • Business Analyst: It’s just a couple of hundred fields that Customer API needs to send to another downstream API to perform the transaction.
  • Developer A: And how will we know the values for these fields that Customer API needs to send?
  • Business Analyst: I’ll take care of it. I have already spoken to the lead developer from the downstream API team, and he’s sent me a spreadsheet. It has all the fields and the values that need to be part of the request body. He’s also sent me a document with information on the headers and auth details required to call the downstream API.
  • Developer A: Is this downstream API available in a testing environment? A playground, maybe?
  • Business Analyst: They’re still working on building the downstream API, so they don’t have a working version yet.

In Development

Developer A gets to work. She pairs with Developer B, another application developer on her team, to finish the Customer API story. Business Analyst sends them an email with a spreadsheet containing the fields and a document that includes the API currently in development by the downstream API team. It seems like Developer A and Developer B have all the information required to start building the Customer API, so they come up with the following list of tasks:

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Attention Is My Most Valuable Asset for Productivity as a Software Developer

Like a tightly written function, I prefer to exit early if no work should be done. So, if you disagree with these definitions and assumptions, now's a good time to stop reading.

  • Sustainable productivity: The maximum rate of quality work output, without loss to the wellbeing of the developer
  • Quality work: Software that meets requirements, is valuable to users, is maintainable, and is as bug-free as possible
  • Attention: The limited mental capacity to focus on a task
  • Sustainable productivity is desired
  • Attention is essential to sustainable productivity

My high-level workflow looks something like this: identify the problem to solve; think on the problem and let ideas percolate; research, discuss, and experiment with these ideas; implement and test the solution; deliver and maintain the solution.

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Why DevOps Should be Responsible for Development Environments

Let’s discuss an extremely common anti-pattern I’ve noticed with teams that are relatively new to containers/cloud-native/Kubernetes, etc. More so than when building traditional monoliths, cloud-native applications can be incredibly complex and, as a result, need a relatively sophisticated development environment. Unfortunately, this need often isn’t evident at the beginning of the cloud-native journey. Development environments are an afterthought – a cumbersome, heavy, brittle drag on productivity.

The best teams treat development environments as a priority and devote significant DevOps/SRE time to perfecting them. In doing so, they end up with development environments that “just work” for every developer, not just those who are experienced with containers and Kubernetes. For these teams, every developer has a fast, easy-to-use development environment that works for every developer every time.

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How do you Like to Collaborate? Take our Survey!

Open source has revolutionized how software is developed. Collaboration and sharing are de facto ways to work with code.

How else do developers like to collaborate, share and learn? Those are just some of the questions we’re asking in our second annual State of the Developer survey. Take this 5-minute survey to help us better understand how you like to learn, what your hurdles are to being more productive and what companies can do to make the developer experience better.

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Agile Enthusiasts: How Do You Stay Productive?

If you like to read articles in the Agile Zone, then you have an interest in how to best maximize time spent on projects. It’s in an Agile disciple’s DNA.

So if you’ve got a minute, we’d like to pick your brain. Our second annual State of the Developer survey is now open. Take this 5-minute survey to help us better understand how you like to learn, what your hurdles are to productivity and what dev-focused companies can do to make the experience better.

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AI Experts: What Helps You Do Your Job Better?

We’ve got a hunch that developers in the AI sector are superstar learners. With the way AI and machine learning are evolving, you have to keep up with the latest news to stay on top of your developer game.

With that in mind, we’d to pick your brain. Our second annual State of the Developer survey is open. Take this 5-minute survey to help us better understand how you like to learn, what your hurdles are to being more productive and what companies can do to make the developer experience better.