Raghavendra Vema

Hello, everyone.

Hi, I'm here to speak about developer experience and, wait. Wait a minute. Why am I here? This is a lightning talk, right? Okay. Let me see how much I can talk about developer experience. There are so many talks around; it's already done. Here's my condensed form, and the long and short of it.

Let me start with a small story of a fictitious developer. Let's call him maybe John Appleseed, the common name everybody knows.

All right. So John Appleseed joins a company which is highly regulated, and they are tech-savvy, they are on cloud, and they promote a lot of good usage of technology and all that stuff. He's tasked with creating microservices.

So with a lot of energy and a lot of exuberance he says, okay, let's do it. And then he says, okay, microservices, I mean, piece of cake, right? I'm just going to build, I'm going to fly, I'm done, I'm going to put it in production. Is that so? Let's find out.

He basically speaks with his teammates and he finds out, oh my gosh, that's not as easy as you think. There's going to be a review process. Then I've got to build my software. Then I have to go through all my scans. Then, fine, I have to go through something called change management. Okay, that's good. And then, finally, into production.

All right, so he finally goes and starts with all the reviews, and that's when he realizes, oh my gosh, how many hurdles do I have to go through? I need to hop through, and he finds n number of places where he needs to onboard. Oh my goodness. He goes to numerous meetings, one after the other, teams after teams, and then finally he gets all the approvals and he's ready to build software.

Okay, I've got my asset registered in my CMDB. All right, let me get started.

All right, so now he has this repository already, but is he ready to build software yet? Probably not. He's like, okay, where do I start? That's what he does. And then he looks around. He goes on different GitHub repositories, all the knowledge bases in the company, and he finds out, what the heck is happening here? Do I need to reinvent the wheel?

And it looks like people over here like copy and paste. Okay, wickedly smiles, and then, okay, let me get started.

And then, coming back to reality, he thinks, okay, this should probably be some kind of developer portal, because how many kinds of microservices are going to be there? And there should be some kind of a blueprint which I can probably reuse in different places.

So he really wishes: okay, I wish there was a developer portal which tells me what's already out there. I mean, people who have already solved some problems, and I could easily find the inventory of that. Also, there should be some kind of scaffolding thing. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, like copy-paste creation of boilerplate code, right? Also there should be an opportunity to collaborate within and reuse, so kind of innersourcing-capable.

All right, so after all this, he finishes this build. He does all that and he commits his code into his repository. Now he thinks, okay, that's it. I'm done. Let me get started.

Apparently this company seems to have a good CI/CD process, which means once you're done with your commit to your repository, you have some kind of automated process to build a release candidate, and it has all the gates and security stuff built in the pipeline.

So he thinks, okay, I'm done. I'm getting started. I kicked off my job. Okay, let me relax.

Okay, that's not true. He runs into a lot of [unclear] problems, and then he has that, like, how did I miss these issues? It breaks, and how did I miss it? So really he thinks there should be a better way of it. Again, maybe there is some magic in my IDE which caught this, or something that's built on the repository to do it. Come on, 2022: all these scanning tools have repository integrations.

And then finally the code is done, and he goes, okay, oh no, I'm ready for production. I have all the evidences. Okay, that's not true. Change management is here.

Then he goes into the change management meeting. He gives all the evidence, and they say, is your monitoring? He says, what the heck, I'm not done with my monitoring. And then finally he does it, and somehow he gets this code into production.

All right. Then he starts thinking there should be a bit...