Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Optimize for Developer Happiness
Search
Ben Balter
April 26, 2016
Technology
0
280
Optimize for Developer Happiness
Why how you work is as important as what you work on
Ben Balter
April 26, 2016
Tweet
Share
More Decks by Ben Balter
See All by Ben Balter
A community of communities: Empowering maintainers to grow communities around their code
benbalter
1
1.3k
Fostering a culture of collaboration
benbalter
0
230
Growing open source communities on GitHub around your WordPress plugin or theme
benbalter
1
240
It takes a digital village
benbalter
1
460
Open source workflows in highly regulated environments
benbalter
0
92
The technology is the easy part
benbalter
2
290
How to foster an open source culture inside Government
benbalter
3
2.4k
Open source inspired workflows for open (and closed) geospatial data
benbalter
0
150
10 ways people are (mis)using GitHub Pages for fun and profit
benbalter
6
640
Other Decks in Technology
See All in Technology
stupid jj tricks
indirect
0
7.6k
Goを使ってTDDを体験しよう!
chiroruxx
1
230
DataOpsNight#8_Terragruntを用いたスケーラブルなSnowflakeインフラ管理
roki18d
1
300
SOC2取得の全体像
shonansurvivors
1
340
AI Agentと MCP Serverで実現する iOSアプリの 自動テスト作成の効率化
spiderplus_cb
0
300
バイブコーディングと継続的デプロイメント
nwiizo
2
360
Sidekiq その前に:Webアプリケーションにおける非同期ジョブ設計原則
morihirok
17
6.4k
AI時代だからこそ考える、僕らが本当につくりたいスクラムチーム / A Scrum Team we really want to create in this AI era
takaking22
0
120
Findy Team+のSOC2取得までの道のり
rvirus0817
0
240
GA technologiesでのAI-Readyの取り組み@DataOps Night
yuto16
0
240
Why React!?? Next.jsそしてReactを改めてイチから選ぶ
ypresto
10
3.7k
GC25 Recap+: Advancing Go Garbage Collection with Green Tea
logica0419
1
310
Featured
See All Featured
Visualizing Your Data: Incorporating Mongo into Loggly Infrastructure
mongodb
48
9.7k
Side Projects
sachag
455
43k
No one is an island. Learnings from fostering a developers community.
thoeni
21
3.5k
Building an army of robots
kneath
306
46k
Refactoring Trust on Your Teams (GOTO; Chicago 2020)
rmw
35
3.2k
CoffeeScript is Beautiful & I Never Want to Write Plain JavaScript Again
sstephenson
162
15k
Rebuilding a faster, lazier Slack
samanthasiow
84
9.2k
StorybookのUI Testing Handbookを読んだ
zakiyama
31
6.2k
Stop Working from a Prison Cell
hatefulcrawdad
271
21k
XXLCSS - How to scale CSS and keep your sanity
sugarenia
248
1.3M
Producing Creativity
orderedlist
PRO
347
40k
Visualization
eitanlees
148
16k
Transcript
! Optimize for developer happiness Why how you work is
as important as what you work on @benbalter
CONWAY'S LAW "organizations which design systems... are constrained to produce
designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"
! Developer-centric development
! STARTUP the fairytale
Low value High value Startup Established firm Ideas Process
Low value High value Startup Established firm Geeks Suits
! What does your organization optimize for?
! Happy shareholders Successful software Efficient developers Strategic management
! Happy shareholders Good software Happy developers Happy Customers
! You can make software without MANAGEMENT
! You can make software without COMPLIANCE AND OVERSIGHT
! You can't make software without DEVELOPERS
! DEVELOPER HAPPINESS Optimize for and the rest will follow
! Developer happiness (Inside|Outside) the firewall
! Inside the firewall
! Traditional software development
! When outcomes can't be measured, institute process
! Daily, synchronous meetings to manually shuttle information around the
organization
! Decisions made in person, in hour-long blocks with
all stakeholders present
! Blocking, human-based processes
! Email as the least-common denominator
! Organizational knowledge lives (and dies) with employees
! bus_factor++
! Open-source development
! Transparency solves for process
! The constraints of open source
! Electronic
! Available
! Asynchronous
! Lock-free
! Prefer systems that naturally CAPTURE AND EXPOSE PROCESS
! Open source inside the firewall
! Open source is a PHILOSOPHY AND A WORKFLOW
not as an alternative technology
! How to WORK LIKE AN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT
! 1. Share to the widest extent possible
! Openness breaks down silos, reduces duplication, and minimizes on-boarding
time
! 2. Minimize developer friction
! Friction (n) the time it takes to go
from "I want to contribute" to "I have contributed"
! Common scripts to rule them all http://githubengineering.com/scripts-to-rule-them-all/
! PREFER CULTURAL CONSTRAINTS to technical and administrative constraints
! Non-blocking is better than blocking
! Never force a human to do what a robot
can
! ChatOps, DevOps, Hubot, and CI
! If you liked it you should have PUT AN
API ON IT
! Outside the firewall
! APIs make developers happy
! Openness makes developers happy
! Two caveats
! 1. Open up almost everything
! 2. Openness is about more than just throwing 0's
and 1's over the firewall
! Treat your data with the same respect that developers
treat code
! Open source, inner source, APIs, & open data all
foster communities around shared challenges
! Be the hub, not the single point of failure
(or innovation)
! Adopt an expanded definition of stakeholders
! Ensure all stakeholders have the opportunity to contribute
on equal footing
! Decentralize governance
! Minimize information imbalance
! 1. Work in the open
! 2. Propose and discuss improvements in the open
! 3. One shared, public issue tracker
! 4. Minimize synchronous meetings (and memorialize them when necessary)
! 5. Extensive, automated tests
! How do you optimize for developer happiness?
! Inside the firewall systems that capture and expose process
! Outside the firewall treat external stakeholders as internal stakeholders
! No really, how do you optimize for developer happiness?
! TECHNOLOGY is the easy part
! Bureaucracy is an organism
! Inoculate with small doses of culture and innovation
! Involve all stakeholders early on
! Start small and go through the motions
! Create a "feedback" repository both internally and externally
! Open data Open governance Open tooling
! DEVELOPER HAPPINESS Optimize for and the rest will follow
! Optimize for developer happiness Why how you work is
as important as what you work on @benbalter