DX on DX (Interview)

This week Adam is joined by Abi Noda, founder and CEO of DX to talk about DX AKA DevEx (or the long-form Developer Experience). Since the dawn of software development there has been this push to understand what makes software teams efficient, but more importantly what does it take to understand developer productivity? That’s what Abi has been focused on for the better part of the last 8 years of his career. He started a company called Pull Panda that was acquired by GitHub, spent a few years there on this problem before going out on his own to start DX which helps startups to the fortune 500 companies gather real insights that leads to real improvement.

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Featuring:

• Abi Noda – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• Pull Panda is shutting down
• DevOps Research and Assessment
• A Better Way to Measure Developer Productivity
• DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity
• How Google Measures and Manages Tech Debt
• Defining, Measuring, and Managing Technical Debt
• Changelog Interviews #527: What it takes to scale engineering (with Rachel Potvin)
• Dr. Nicole Forsgren Joins DX

For our ++ subs

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• Changelog Interviews #466: Song Encoder on $STDOUT

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:13) - Sponsor: Sentry
(04:46) - Start the show!
(08:19) - Falling in love with DX
(10:21) - DevX vs DX?
(13:14) - DX vs developer productivity
(16:04) - How devs value their work
(20:49) - Let's go back to Pull Panda
(27:34) - Getting devs to be truthful
(35:05) - Why hasn't this been done before?
(38:08) - Abi shares example questions
(53:19) - Sponsor: Caisy
(56:10) - Is DX just a survey company?
(1:00:12) - Are you transforming companies?
(1:02:14) - Who cares about DX?
(1:06:20) - What size company does this?
(1:10:28) - DX team of 1
(1:22:36) - The DX playbook
(1:25:08) - Let's give a prescription for DX
(1:28:21) - Why do people fill out these surveys?
(1:33:45) - Wrapping up
(1:34:52) - Teasing the BONUS