Kurt Mackey
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
All right, so public clouds suck. I actually think most ways of hosting stuff on the internet sucks. And I have a lot of theories about why this is, but it almost doesn't matter. The reality is if I've built a new app for generating sandwich recipes, because my family's just into specific types of sandwiches that use Braunschweiger as a component, for example.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
And then I want to like put that somewhere. You go to AWS and it's harder than just going and getting like a dedicated server from Hetzner. It's like it's actually like more complicated to figure out how to deploy my dumb sandwich app on top of AWS because it's not built for me as a developer to be productive with. It's built for other people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
It's built for platform teams to kind of build the infrastructure of their dreams and hopefully create a new UX that's useful for the developers that they work with. And again, I feel like every time I talk about this, it's like I'm just too impatient. I don't particularly want to go figure so many things out purely to put my Sandwich app in front of people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
And I don't particularly want to have to go talk to a platform team once my Sandwich app becomes a huge startup and IPOs and I have to do a deploy. I kind of feel like all that stuff should just work for me without me having to go ask permission or talk to anyone else. And so this has informed a lot of how we've built Fly. Like, we're still a public cloud.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
We still have a lot of very similar low-level primitives as the bigger guys. But in general, they're designed to be used directly by developers. They're not built for a platform team to kind of cobble together. They're designed to be... useful quickly for developers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
One of the ways we've thought about this is if you can turn a very difficult problem into a two hour problem, people will build much more interesting types of apps. And so this is why we've done things like made it easy to run an app multi-region. Most companies don't run multi-region apps on public clouds because it's functionally impossible to do without a huge amount of upfront effort.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
It's why we've made things like the the virtual machine primitives behind just a simple API. Most people don't do like code sandboxing or their own virtualization because it's just not really easy. It's not there's just no path to that on top of the clouds. So in general, like I feel like and it's not really fair of me to say public cloud suck because they were built for a different time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
If you build One of these things starting in 2007, the world's very different than it is right now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Free-threaded Python (Interview)
And so a lot of what I'm saying, I think, is that public clouds are kind of old and there's a new version of public clouds that we should all be building on top of that are definitely gonna make me as a developer much happier than I was like five or six years ago when I was kind of stuck in this quagmire.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)
Right. I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind the cloud because you can build better features for users, basically, if you understand that. You can do a lot of stuff, particularly now that people are doing LLM stuff, but you can do a lot of stuff if you get that and can be creative with it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)
In some ways, it means these all came from somewhere. Like there was a simpler time before clouds where we'd get a server at Rackshack and we'd SSH or Telnet into it even and put files somewhere and run the web servers ourselves to serve them up to users. Clouds are not magic on top of that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)
They're just more complicated ways of doing those same things in a way that meets the needs of a lot of people instead of just one. One of the things I think that people miss out on, and a lot of this is actually because AWS and GCP have created such big black box abstractions. Like Lambda is really black boxy. You can't like pick apart Lambda and see how it works from the outside.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)
You have to sort of just use what's there. But the reality is like Lambda is not all that complicated. It's just a modern way to launch little VMs and serve some requests from them and let them like kind of pause and resume and free up like physical compute time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)
The interesting thing about understanding how clouds work is it lets you build kind of features for your users you never would expect it. And our canonical version of this for us is that like when we looked at how we wanted to isolate user code, we decided to just expose this machines concept, which is a much lower level abstraction of Lambda that you could use to build Lambda on top of.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)
And what machines are is just these VMs. that are designed to start really fast or designed to stop and then restart really fast or designed to suspend sort of like your laptop does when it closes and resume really fast when you tell them to. And what we found is that giving people those primitives actually, there's like new apps being built that couldn't be built before.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Elasticsearch is open source, again (Interview)
Specifically because we went so low level and made such a minimal abstraction on top of generally like Linux kernel features. A lot of our platform is actually just exposing a nice UX around Linux kernel features, which I think is kind of interesting. But like you still need to understand what they're doing to get the most use out of them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
All right, so public clouds suck. I actually think most ways of hosting stuff on the internet sucks. And I have a lot of theories about why this is, but it almost doesn't matter. The reality is like I've built a new app for like generating sandwich recipes because my family's just into specific types of sandwiches that use Braunschweiger as a component, for example.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
And then I want to like put that somewhere. You go to AWS and it's harder than just going and getting like a dedicated server from Headster. It's like, it's actually like more complicated to figure out how to deploy my dumb sandwich app on top of AWS because it's not built for me as a developer to be productive with. It's built for other people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
It's built for platform teams to kind of build the infrastructure of their dreams and hopefully create a new UX that's useful for the developers that they work with. And again, I feel like every time I talk about this, it's like I'm just too impatient. I don't particularly want to go figure so many things out purely to put my Sandwich app in front of people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
And I don't particularly want to have to go talk to a platform team once my Sandwich app becomes a huge startup and IPOs and I have to do a deploy. I kind of feel like all that stuff should just work for me without me having to go ask permission or talk to anyone else. And so this is a lot of, it's informed a lot of how we built Fly. Like we're still a public cloud.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
We still have a lot of very similar low-level primitives as the bigger guys. But in general, they're designed to be used directly by developers. They're not built for a platform team to kind of cobble together. They're designed to be useful quickly for developers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
One of the ways we've thought about this is if you can turn a very difficult problem into a two hour problem, people will build much more interesting types of apps. And so this is why we've done things like made it easy to run an app multi-region. Most companies don't run multi-region apps on public clouds because it's functionally impossible to do without a huge amount of upfront effort.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
It's why we've made things like the virtual machine primitives behind just a simple API. Most people don't do like code sandboxing or their own virtualization because it's just not really easy. It's not, there's just no path to that on top of the clouds. So in general, like I feel like, and it's not really fair of me to say public cloud suck because they were built for a different time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
If you build one of these things starting in 2007, The world's very different than it is right now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
And so a lot of what I'm saying, I think, is that public clouds are kind of old and there's a new version of public clouds that we should all be building on top of that are definitely gonna make me as a developer much happier than I was like five or six years ago when I was kind of stuck in this quagmire.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (Remastered) (Interview)
Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The democratization of spreadsheets (News)
Why does the cloud suck, Kurt? Well, there are a lot of clouds. Usually I'm lamenting when I say the cloud sucks, it's AWS and its competitors, Azure and GCP are just AWS again. Honestly, I think those clouds suck for me because I'm a developer. I'm not like a person who wants to operate cloud components. I'd rather just build apps and make them run, like put them somewhere.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The democratization of spreadsheets (News)
Yeah, but that's not really what those clouds are for. And so the net effect is that if I launch like, I don't know, a Next app or a Rails app or a Phoenix app, as I would do lately, I don't even know where to start with this necessarily on AWS at this point. Like they have a catalog of like 400 products.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The democratization of spreadsheets (News)
You probably only need three of them, but you just gotta figure out which ones and how to string them together For like a Phoenix app on AWS, you're going to end up needing a VPC, which they'll give you by default these days. You need to know what a VPC is. You need probably either a Fargate or their Kubernetes setup to run the actual application. You need RDS.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The democratization of spreadsheets (News)
You need an Elastic Load Balancer or an Application Load Balancer running in front of it. And on the other end of that, you've got the Heroku effect, which is like you can get a Rails app running. And this is like 2000. Amy was really excited about this. You can get a Rails app running really fast as long as it's Rails and as long as it uses Postgres.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The democratization of spreadsheets (News)
And as soon as you need to do something else, you're like back in the AWS quagmire.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And I don't particularly want to have to go talk to a platform team once my sandwich app becomes a huge startup and IPOs and I have to do a deploy. I kind of feel like all that stuff should just work for me without me having to go ask permission or talk to anyone else. And so this informed a lot of how we built Fly. We're still a public cloud.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I think it's so cool to build something as a startup that is attractive enough, not just to be acquired, but to be a hopefully integral function of scale for a already decade successful global leader. You know what I mean? Like how bad ass is that?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
We still have a lot of very similar low-level primitives as the bigger guys. But in general, they're designed to be used directly by developers. They're not built for a platform team to kind of cobble together. They're designed to be useful quickly for developers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
That's cool.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
One of the ways we've thought about this is if you can turn a very difficult problem into a two-hour problem, people will build much more interesting types of apps. And so this is why we've done things like made it easy to run an app multi-region. Most companies don't run multi-region apps on public clouds because it's it's functionally impossible to do without a huge amount of upfront effort.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So you're saying that being able to flex the muscles of M&A or incubation is, is something that I think startups should, since startups have no past, they only have the future. How can startups, they're all incubation. They're not really performance productivity because they're learning what should be
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, I, you know, I have chat GPT here. And so I just said, chat GPT, summarize zone to win.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so that was the performance zone, the productivity zone, and the incubation zone.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
There you go.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
There you go. You pass. You have an A. So you mentioned Intel and you kind of hinted at some sort of demise of sorts. There's definitely turbulent waters for them in our side chat on LinkedIn, which is how this conversation came back. I'm like, hey, it's been a long time since we talked. I'm sure lots have happened. Is there anything we could talk about? And you said, absolutely.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And one of the things you mentioned was chip wars. So I got to imagine this innovation mind you have, this vision, find it, achieve it, do it, not integrate it because that's not really where you thrive. And then being blessed with this world of Equinix where you have global access to AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, all the major players, a whole different conversation than you had before.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
What was the secrets? What did you learn? What can you share with us that we would never know that only you would know? That's not part of your NDA.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
It's why we've made things like the virtual machine primitives behind just a simple API. Most people don't do like code sandboxing or their own virtualization because it's just not really easy. There's no path to that on top of the clouds. So in general, like I feel like and it's not really fair of me to say public cloud suck because they were built for a different time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You mean like cloud-based GPUs kind of things turn into some sort of service kind of thing where they're not giving you the actual hardware anymore. They're just going to give you access to the compute and power of it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
If you build one of these things starting in 2007, the world's very different than it is right now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
That's what we're here for.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so a lot of what I'm saying, I think, is that public clouds are kind of old and there's a new version of public clouds that we should all be building on top of that are definitely gonna make me as a developer much happier than I was like five or six years ago when I was kind of stuck in this quagmire.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So AWS was built for a different era, a different cloud era, and Fly, a public cloud, yes, but a public cloud built for developers who ship. That's the difference. And we here at ChangeLog are developers who ship, so you should trust us. Try out Fly, fly.io. Over 3 million apps, that includes us, have launched on Fly.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Okay, we're here in the breaks. I'm here with Firas Bugadige, founder and CEO of Socket.dev. So Firas, you put out this fire post recently on X. And I'm going to paraphrase. You say the XZ package backdoor was just the tip of the iceberg. Give me just a peek behind the scenes of this incident and what you mean by it's just the tip of the iceberg.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
They leverage the global anti-cast load balancing, the zero-config private networking, hardware isolation, instant WireGuard VPN connections with push-button deployments, scaling to thousands of instances. This is the cloud you want. Check it out, fly.io. Again, fly.io.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Okay, friends, go to socket.dev. Security dependencies. Socket is on the front lines of securing the open source ecosystem. They're a developer-first security platform that protects your code from both vulnerable and malicious dependencies. Install the GitHub app or book a demo. Again, socket.dev. That's S-O-C-K-E-T dot dev.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So are you saying that NVIDIA and these players that are providing these expensive AI GPUs, things like this, this new tech, I suppose is probably the easier way to say it, should learn from the Apple model of this? Every 18 months, there's a recycling of tech. I'm getting the latest, greatest. The older version of it is cycling out. And I can rely on the best being available to me.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And the company like NVIDIA can lean back on this predictability of a sales cycle, essentially. So as they have CapEx and innovation, this new thing they're working so hard on has a place to go.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
One person says that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
We talked about racking and stacking last time we talked and there's joy in it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I want to talk about that, but I want to put, I hate this phrase. I'm going to say it though. I want to put a pin in it just temporarily.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Because I want to throw something out there because we departed from one part of this conversation that I want to just throw out there for both of you. And if we like the Apple model of this, you know, every X months or every X years, I'm cycling out my phone and we're all on Macintosh computers. We're all in Apple, M1, M star computers, all three of us in this conversation.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Why haven't they done that with the Mac computer? They've done it well with the iPhone. I'm not swapping out my phone, my, my computer the same way I can with my phone. if it's such a good model, are they just not eating their own dog food or drink their own champagne in terms of this model with the Mac?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Is there, is there a reason why they haven't conquered that market where I'm swapping on my Mac every two years? Cause the latest greatest is there. They're taking the old thing away and they make it an easy process. Now you can, you can go and buy the new thing, but the process that they've put in place for the phone is so turnkey. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I would certainly consider it if it was available. And if it was productized like the way the iPhone is available to everyone, I do understand that there is a subsidy there that carriers are playing. There's an underwriter that is essentially making it easier for me to consume.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I'm not sure if I would personally, but I know there's a, I would say a minority, but still very large market that pays attention to the latest capabilities of Apple's machines as a desktop.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so I may not be personally, but I can appreciate it being available because there's people who really, every time there's the newest version of it, whatever the major advancement of it is, and it might be every two years, they're the ones buying it
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
But similar to the way you buy a car or a large liability that seems like an investment, which is what a machine – this computer is an investment because it makes you make money – But it's still a liability in the fact that it goes down in terms of its cost or its value to someone else.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So you may buy it for like three or four grand, which is a pretty good average for most decent MacBook Pros. Let's just say four grand, right? I buy it for four grand today at the latest gen price, and I want to recycle it two years from now. Apple doesn't have a program where I can just go and buy the new thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
They do have the trading program, but it's not predictable in terms of what I get back for today's investment. And I think that's what they've done well with the iPhone is that I know pretty much, well, if I'm on latest tech, I probably get 800 bucks-ish for my old tech to cycle out for the new tech. There's some rebate program out there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Or just these programs you can pay for and just you never own it and you're always happy. Like the New World Order said, like the World Economic Forum said, you will own nothing and be happy about it. And I kind of feel like you're saying that with this stuff too. Like this Apple model of this is good. And I kind of hate that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I kind of like it as a consumer and the fact that I get access and this promised, predictable, priced-in access to latest tech. But then the other part of me is like, man, I'm renting everything I own. Everything I have has a subscription attached to it in some way, shape, or form. So every new dependency in my life...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
whether it's food, a bed, and I won't name a name, or something else is reaching into my pocket with some subscription. And it's kind of essential to my life, personally or professionally.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You used a word earlier, I believe it was like circulatory or circular.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Circular, circular. There you go, simple. And I think you mentioned what Kyle Wiens talked about with me on a podcast. Do you know Kyle Wiens by any chance? Does his name ring a bell?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
He is the person who started iFixit. And they really started out as a wiki or kind of like everybody can share their own how to fix something because of all this right to repair situation.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
That kind of touches on this circular thing you're talking about in parts pairing, which you talked about tangentially earlier. I'm just curious your thoughts on this. A power supply having to be thrown out as a result of a new CPU, which is a ton of waste.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You've got things, and I put the pin in with the one thing, I think to bring it back might be to discuss your thoughts on Oxide and what they're doing to sort of give you a full integrated, as best they can guarantee of all the stack working together in concert versus things not working software-wise or hardware-wise.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So this idea of circular, this idea of parts pairing, and this idea of a full stack thing you buy versus parts in the middle.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
What does it mean to be circular or circularity? What does that mean to you?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So tonight is the first time back to these dorms?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
It's better than like sitting on a shelf, collecting dust, having no use or going into a literal landfill where someone doesn't dispose of it properly. Maybe it has a battery in there, blows up a garbage truck. We've heard stories like that, you know, where basically if it doesn't have a removable battery, you're just renting the thing anyways. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Like I'm upset with my AirPods right now because they don't last as long and there's nothing I can do about it. All I can do is buy another set, you know, for the new retail price, you know, whatever that is. And the current version I have is basically worthless, but there you go.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So where do they go?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Any jitters to go back? What's your feelings? Nostalgia? Fear? Concern?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
make the computer make the rack better and then now that you have disruptively scalable and efficient economics on making computers you know figure out how to run them better for people you can go listen to this podcast at full length brian shares the story with me but the catalyst to do oxide officially was born out of angst of support from dell that they had an extreme issue that i'm going to paraphrase because the podcast is better and brian tells the story better
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Let's talk. Hey friends, you know we're big fans of fly.io and I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly. Kurt, we've had some conversations and I've heard you say that public clouds suck. What is your personal lens into public clouds sucking and how does Fly not suck?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
But there was a major issue that they were just like basically band-aiding over and they couldn't explain. And it was because of interoperability between the hardware they chose to put within their machines and their systems, whether it was software or hardware. And Brian was smart enough because he's back in the ZFS and D-Trace days like Brian's a smart guy.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
He's not just the entrepreneur in the moment working at Sun trying to solve this problem. it was a whole different thing that they were dealing with. And he's like, yeah, I'm reading between this line. And he had a venture capitalist who was like, you know, I will literally fund anything. This is in quotes. I will literally fund anything you put in front of me.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so he was like, okay, maybe this is the time I need to go big. And so that was the catalyst. This angst of this interoperability between the stack that is like, here's one server, here's the compute, here's the storage, and none of them are made to work necessarily in concert. One blames the other. Dell hides this thing and his story is his story. So take that with what you will.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And I'm sure it's fully true because Brian's a truth teller.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
That's all we do.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. You released this recently. Tell me more.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Very cool. So Dylan, one thing I love is this playground you have. You can go there, assemblyai.com slash playground, and you can just play around with all the things that is assembly. Is this the recommended path? Is this the try before you buy experience? people do?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser. Or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. And also by our friends over at Wix.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I've got just 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for freelancers, agencies, and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less on Studio. Number one, integrate experience. Extend and write custom scripts in a VS Code based IDE. Two, leverage zero setup dev, test, and production environments. Three, ship faster with an AI code assistant.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And four, work with Wix headless APIs on any tech stack. Wix Studio is for devs who build websites, sell apps, go headless, or manage clients. Well, my time is up, but the list keeps going on. Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Go to wix.com slash studio. Once again, wix.com slash studio. Do you have a crystal ball?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
No? Could you assume you do? I'm going to ask you to predict the future to best you can.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, I think that you've got a lens that Jared and I can appreciate and conversate with you about and dig in. But I've got to imagine between how we can cycle out at the data center level, this new age, this innovative tech coming out,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
these models, this thought on the rack stack kind of scenario where you get the oxide model, which to my knowledge, they're really the only player in this town, really. So if their idea is successful, then they have a very large head start and a deeply entrenched moat. There's a lot that it would take to bow them. Where is this going? Where is this cycling out GPUs, CPUs, chip ores, hardware?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Where's it going?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
What is the future?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You will own nothing and you will like it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You kind of feel it in real time because if you're off pace, coming too early, coming too late, not there at all, you know, it's pretty clear.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Were you a fan of the, I know it's not the same instrument, but were you a fan of the movie Whiplash? Did you see the movie?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yes. Let's see. Who's the Whiplash movie cast? Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, and Paul Reiser. And a few other actors that were in there, too. But those were the main ones that were in there. Miles was the student, the new student. He was playing drums. And I believe the famed song they played in the movie was called Whiplash. Ah, okay. And it was jazz. So it really had this very fast-paced...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Is there a possibility of, I think back to the idea of habit stacking, Jerry, where the habit might be liquid coal, a server rack in a data center, and the need for clean water. Is there a way to combine interests? Now that you're sort of, let's face it, you're at a position in life where you can pause, so you must be financially well off enough to pause.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Does part of your daydreaming think about... not just capitalistic innovation opportunities, but legacy things. You've got kids. You obviously seem like a very caring person, as I know you. Is there room for combining these efforts to power a data center and clean water? Buy a waterfall. I don't know. Is there a combination of things? Not buy, literally B-Y, but B-Y. Buy a waterfall.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Put a data center near there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yeah, exactly. Something where... I don't know. Is that a thing? I'm here in Texas and... Lake Travis is not a lake anymore. It's dirt and like little islands out there. There's like a little bit of water in there. I ride at this place. I ride mountain bikes and it's by slaughter Creek. Slaughter Creek is not a Creek anymore.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And it's, you know, it's one thing that I don't think it's like climate change kind of thing, but I think it's just really hot and, And there's a lot of people in this area and the aquifer gets less replenished. I mean, is there ways we can level up humanity in these ways and liquid cool, but also find ways to keep the water, produce the water, cloud sea? Do you think about things like that big?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
double time kind of high tempo symbol writing. And yeah, like just a horrendous beat to, to maintain as a drummer. If you're good, not horrendous. If you're up and coming, like a brand new student, like miles was, is his character, Andrew, then you're on, you're on pace. But the relationship between the conductor, JK Simmons, his, his character was named Terrence.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Very cool. Yeah. Cool talking through it too. I think the, when you mentioned Bernie hydrogen to create water, I thought about Mark Watney in the movie, the Martian, but also the book, the Martian, he blew himself up cause he had his ratios wrong. And when he lit it on fire, it was too much of one and not enough of the other. And it created a bomb basically.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
The relationship was very violent. For example, he was very kind to him initially. And then he ended up throwing, I think, a chair at him as his first attempt to maintain the tempo with everybody else. Like you're seeing like this importance of being together, this feedback to being tight. His feedback loop was probably pretty on for our ears.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Like it was just a small bomb, but it really messed things up.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yeah. That's a good formula.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, even like to zoom out a little bit, like there was parts of the conversation where I almost interjected about this capitalistic push of this subscription model, this idea that the way they can fund this innovation, which I get the innovation needs to be there, Intel and others, but they can only do that innovation if they can sustain themselves through some version of subscription. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
But then you peel back the layer that it seems like the draw to the end, not the means, is this idea of creating enough capital to push the thing forward. And then they're just in the cycle, like you had just said, this is an example of creating a new data center. This is how we've done it. This is how we do it. And so you almost kind of get this angst against capitalism, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
It's the driver of it. And I think you're the kind of person who aligns the capitalistic thoughts and innovation with the human necessary needs, not just to make a successful product. or project or a thing or an acquisition, but something that levels up humanity.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And I just, I just think that's a, it's an interesting thought experiment is like, you know, how can we align capitalism with humanism so that we are still here and not just to spend our money, but also to enjoy the lives we've been given.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
All right, so public clouds suck. I actually think most ways of hosting stuff on the internet sucks. And I have a lot of theories about why this is, but it almost doesn't matter. The reality is like I've built a new app for like generating sandwich recipes because my family's just into specific types of sandwiches. They use Braunschweiger as a component, for example.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I so feel that, you know?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
We can dream. Yeah, maybe. We can dream, right? What else, Jared? Anything left for this, friends?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
No, we got more tape. I got more tape for Plus Plus. We have a Plus Plus zone to our podcast. We're speaking about zones in the book. Yes. We have Plus Plus zone, which is... It's our performance zone. Yeah, there you go. Folks pay us... It's our members-only zone. They pay us to have a special feed that does not have ads. It's our subscription zone.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And then some of those people actually want a feed of ads, so I'm just really...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
confused yeah i don't get it are they like awesome super bowl style ads are they like you know i don't want to toot my own horn but we do a pretty good job of producing ads okay and it's not the read it's not my radio voice it's not it's our ability to share the story of the brands who want to connect with their audience and tell that story and try to do our best to do that that's probably the easiest way i can say it there we go
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
But to the conductor's ears, he's like, no matter what you would do, you were wrong. And so it's a very interesting movie, I would say, as somebody who is outside that bubble, whereas you're inside that bubble being part of a larger band that plays fantastic music together in concert. Well, for people, you know, so I thought maybe you've seen that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I think they're enjoyable. I like producing them. They're a lot of fun. And they're not just like, and this is brought to you by so-and-so. Go buy their thing at so-and-so.com. It's not like that. It's far more like, Zach, why did you do this? Why should our listeners care? And you tell them. And then we conversate about it. And it's like a segment of a podcast as an ad.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
How cool, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Oh, man. We'll take you into the zone here in just a second, if you don't mind.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So, twist ending. While we were talking about the iPhone and the ubiquity of... It's better.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And then I want to like put that somewhere. You go to AWS and it's harder than just going and getting like a dedicated server from Hetzner. It's like it's actually like more complicated to figure out how to deploy my dumb sandwich app on top of AWS because it's not built for me as a developer to be productive with. It's built for other people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Totally. For sure.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, let's go to maybe some deeper talk. The last time that we talked, Zach, I would say you're on Friends because I would consider you a friend. I never made it to the data center like we talked about, I think, at the end of the podcast. That's okay, though. I love a good data center tour.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
To just layer on some of the conversation we had, we had a great conversation on Founders Talk 84 back in 2021. So that's the last time we talked. This is like three years. almost three years to the month to the day almost. And the last time I talked to you, you were really on this new trajectory with Equinix metal.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Your company packet had been acquired by Equinix, the very large behemoth global dominator in infrastructure, you know, servers everywhere, data centers everywhere. And this was a, a great thing for you and great thing for your company and, And here you are essentially being acquired by Equinix and you go from startup to global company.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so preceding this conversation, you know, managing, criticism, stuff like that, I got to imagine that this journey into the big world, the bigger world of automating bare metal, took its toll in good ways and bad ways.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
It's built for platform teams to kind of build the infrastructure of their dreams and hopefully create a new UX that's useful for the developers that they work with. And again, I feel like every time I talk about this, it's like I'm just too impatient. I don't particularly want to go figure so many things out purely to put my sandwich app in front of people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
What happened with that acquisition, with your role there? Did you enjoy it? What made you take a step away? Because you're no longer there. That was 2023, a year ago, I think, roughly, you stepped away from that role. Catch us up and let's go from there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Peeking out like the groundhog. We were peeking out.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And at Atlassian, not only do they have a pretty substantial portion of their engineering organization that is devoted to this type of stuff, But they give all product engineering teams at Atlassian 10% of their time to be spent fixing things, as they call it, fixing things that suck, right? That get in the way of...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So, but to answer your question, Adam, what do we do about it and what's preventing us from doing things about it? I think it actually boils down to the fact that you see a survey like this from Stack Overflow, right? People are unhappy, you know, it's because of technical debt and the developer experience issues.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
But to actually do something about it as a business, you have to be able to calculate that the cost of doing something about it is outweighed by the return on investment you're going to get after you do something about it. And I think that's a really hard problem right now. No one knows how to actually quantify this thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
set of things the developer experience right and it's something that you can take to the cfo or ceo and say hey like we we're slow because of x y and z and if we fix x y and z we'll be this much faster and it'll be worth it that's that's the hard problem so no one can make the case for doing something about a lot of this stuff because you can't talk about it in terms of dollars
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
The way they ask that question, I wonder if that's how they've asked it before. I'd be curious if you could...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. So how satisfied are you in your current professional developer role? Not happy at work. Complacent at work, happy at work. As someone who spends a lot of time on survey design, I do see a few potential issues. So they're asking about satisfaction, but then the responses are about happiness, which in satisfaction or happiness are really different constructs.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
that middle option is complacent. So it's not happy, happy, or complacent. But complacency, it's not really the perfect middle between not happy and happy. I think it captures the essence of in between not happy and happy, but it's not necessarily the perfect middle. So it's an interesting way that they've asked the question, because is it measuring job satisfaction or happiness?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Happiness, I think, is... really hard to actually measure. So I think that's why they worded it around satisfaction. You know, happiness, there's a lot of literature about how to actually measure happiness. There's entire fields where they've spent years trying to figure out how to measure happiness and what happiness is. And usually happiness is the sum of moments of feeling happy, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Like how, like if you took the day and divided it up into however many minutes and Like in each minute or how many times throughout the day did you feel, have a feeling of happiness as opposed to non-happiness? And that's kind of how you get to how happy you are, right? Rather than a point in time reflection of happiness, which is pretty difficult. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Anyways, I'm nerding out here a little bit on the survey design.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I want to talk about this idea of how can people talk about these problems in terms of dollars?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
The topic is, as the title implies, how to measure anything, and in particular, how to measure things that are seemingly unmeasurable. So when we talk about what is the dollar ROI or interest rate or cost of technical debt and poor developer experience, that's Just a few minutes ago, we were essentially calling that unmeasurable. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
In this book, they talk about how anything if you want to measure something in terms of dollars or cost. that you can really do that with anything. So as long as you, you take something intangible like technical debt or developer experience, and then you correlate it to something objective or something monetary, uh,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So an example of this would be the DORA metrics in the DORA report, which I know you guys have followed. So what they essentially did is say- Give us a primer for those who aren't caught up on that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So DORA is the DevOps Research and Assessment. But since, I want to say, 2013, maybe they've been publishing an annual report on the state of DevOps. And right now, we're talking about tech debt and developer experience. But eight years ago, people were talking about DevOps and, hey, what is the ROI of investing in DevOps? So it's the same problem. History repeats itself.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And what they did was they said, here are some ways we can measure DevOps. So it was like metrics like MTTR and lead time, deployment frequency. So they said, here's DevOps. And what they did is correlate it to companies' profitability, stock performance.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
returns and increases you know emps scores and and by doing that they were able to quote unquote prove and and show the dollar roi hey companies when they invest in devops and get x percentage better their stock prices tend to be x percentage higher right they tend to be x percentage more profitable and so it wasn't perfect yeah that seems a little bit brittle to me
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Let me tell you what we're doing with developer experience. So we have this construct of what is developer experience. So we have our version of what Stack Overflow has here, where we have, it's called the developer experience index. So it's 14 of the top drivers of developer experience. So we say, okay, that's how we measure developer experience.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Then what we've been doing is correlating that measure to different outcomes. And one of them is actually self-reported time waste reported by developers. So how much time do you, it's a series of different questions we ask about. How much time do you lose each week? How much time is wasted each week due to inefficiencies?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And when we correlate the two and we found that like a one point increase in the developer experience index score, which is the average of these 14 different areas of developer experience, a one point increase in that score. So one point increase in developer experience translates to almost a one percent decrease in time wasted. And so, again, this isn't perfect.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You could call this brittle as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, and it's more direct to dollars. It's not like stock price, which is a little bit of a leap, right? A lot of things, so many things affect the stock price. So, you know, using this approach, we can, folks can say, hey, if we improve developer experience by X points, that translates to X percentage reduction in waste, which translates to X amount of dollars, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So that's how we're approaching it right now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
DXI, yeah, DXI, Developer Experience Index.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It is. Yeah, I mean, we can't think of any other way to do it. I think the feedback we get is, this is great. If we can make this an industry standard, then my CEO is going to buy it. But there's still an education and... you know, marketing gap there where folks, what I just explained to you, it's hard to get that across in like a five minute executive summary. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
No, we should. I mean, we already have the data because we are already surveying hundreds of thousands of people. Right. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
All right, so public clouds suck. I actually think most ways of hosting stuff on the internet sucks. And I have a lot of theories about why this is, but it almost doesn't matter. The reality is if I've built a new app for generating sandwich recipes, because my family's just into specific types of sandwiches. They use Braunschweiger as a component, for example.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And then I want to like put that somewhere. You go to AWS and it's harder than just going and getting like a dedicated server from Hetzner. It's like it's actually like more complicated to figure out how to deploy my dumb sandwich app on top of AWS because it's not built for me as a developer to be productive with. It's built for other people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It's built for platform teams to kind of build the infrastructure of their dreams and hopefully create a new UX that's useful for the developers that they work with. And again, I feel like every time I talk about this, it's like I'm just too impatient. I don't particularly want to go figure so many things out purely to put my Sandwich app in front of people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And I don't particularly want to have to go talk to a platform team once my Sandwich app becomes a huge startup and IPOs and I have to do a deploy. I kind of feel like all that stuff should just work for me without me having to go ask permission or talk to anyone else. And so this is a lot as informed a lot of how we built fly like we're still a public cloud.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
We still have a lot of very similar low level primitives as the bigger guys. But in general, they're designed to be used directly by developers. They're not built for a platform team to kind of cobble together. They're designed to be. useful quickly for developers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
One of the ways we've thought about this is if you can turn a very difficult problem into a two-hour problem, people will build much more interesting types of apps. And so this is why we've done things like made it easy to run an app multi-region. Most companies don't run multi-region apps on public clouds because it's functionally impossible to do without a huge amount of upfront effort.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It's why we've made things like the virtual machine primitives behind just a simple API. Most people don't do code sandboxing or their own virtualization because it's just not really easy. There's just no path to that on top of the clouds. So in general, I feel like, and it's not really fair of me to say public clouds suck because they were built for a different time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
If you build one of these things starting in 2007, The world's very different than it is right now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And so a lot of what I'm saying, I think, is that public clouds are kind of old and there's a new version of public clouds that we should all be building on top of that are definitely gonna make me as a developer much happier than I was like five or six years ago when I was kind of stuck in this quagmire.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I thought you were talking about WordPress.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I like it a lot. I'm writing it down. I like the cross-examination piece.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
organization look like that has the ability to actually index this index and have that for themselves right yeah i love it that's a question that's that was a question oh what did they actually like the question but that was also a question yeah i mean what's the foundation to get to this point to have a 14 metrics right isn't it 14 metrics yeah 14 different metrics we so we haven't open sourced it right now it's proprietary man yeah i mean there's that's actually
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
One of the biggest strategic questions I've been wrestling with for over a year now. Do we open it up or do we keep it proprietary?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. I think we can open source it while putting like a copyright on it. So you can't necessarily, you know, you're not technically supposed to use it for commercial, you know, within a, within like Walmart can't actually use, deploy it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I mean, the deploy it, they, you know, we, we have the survey items, the measurements for, for those 14 and they deploy our platform, right? That's why it's proprietary because they can't do it without, without our product from you. Yeah. DX. But in terms of like who it is, We work with the Pinterest, the Dropboxes, the Netflixes, the bleeding edge tech companies.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And we also work with... I mean, this isn't to diminish these organizations, but companies like Pfizer, P&G, Tesco, Bank of New York, BNY. So I think what we've seen is the DXI works in all kinds of environments, not just the bleeding edge tech companies, but... you know, more legacy traditional enterprises as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, I mean, we did a meta-analysis, which we've published, and I'll give you guys a link to that. We actually have developerexperienceindex.com. I have that vanity URL. Nice.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It is a little long. Gosh. But... Anyways, so we, you know, the R value was point, I think it was like point some five. That's a really strong relationship between developer experience and Timeway. So then on an individual company basis, we can look at their relationship, right? We just run that correlation for an individual company.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And we always see a moderate to strong relationship at any given organization as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That's a great question. Like, do we see a different relationship at different bands?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. We haven't studied that, but I will add that to my notes as well. That's really interesting, yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. Did you go to developerexperienceindex.com?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, that's the white paper.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It's taken years to arrive at those 14.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, I think change confidence, it's about... It's a lot about how easy it is to actually test a change, like get feedback on a change. So I think everything from cloud dev environments, right? All these things kind of interrelate. So cloud dev environments that allow you to quickly spin up a staging environment for just your change to easily manually test stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Obviously, things like test coverage. Now, you know, AI is coming into the picture there with... helping, you know, write tests or even manually QA, uh, your work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So, so yeah, change confidence is about like when you make a code change, are you kind of like yellowing it when you ship it and just hoping it, it works or do you actually feel confident that when you make a change, it also just has to do with code quality, right? Like if you make a change in one area of the code, does it, is it a house of cards or, you know, cascading effects and
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So a lot of things go into it, but it's ultimately about, you know, the developers feel like they can actually make changes or are they just, you know, duct taping things and hoping that it works when they deploy it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Documentation, right? So just if you're modifying code, can you even understand how that code works so you're confident in changing that little bit of code, right? So yeah, a lot of things. All these factors interrelate, right? Even something like batch size, which is about incremental delivery. Like if you're working on huge changes, huge PRs, there's so much more risk, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You just have a lot more surface area. So if you're delivering incrementally, your confidence is going to be higher for each unit of change, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It's been in the works for a while. DXI is one of the big things. The other is the Core 4, which is the other. If you go to that research tab.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
DX Core 4. Yeah. So if you go to that research tab on our website, there's the developer experience index. And above it, the DX Core 4 is something else we've been developing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So that's the outcome of this. But the real problem we've been trying to solve is, I think last year I came on here, Adam, and we talked about the DevEx framework I'd published with Nicole Forsgren and others. And so ever since we published that, people have been coming to us and saying, hey, like,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Nicole created Dora, Nicole and Margaret created the space framework, and then you, Nicole and Margaret created the DevEx framework. We have three frameworks now for telling us what we're supposed to be measuring in our organizations. How do we actually, so what, to sum it all up, like what should we actually be measuring? And the funny, I was just talking.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
This is the one to rule them all. This is the one framework to rule them all because... Replace the other three. Not replace. This encapsulates all of them. This combines them all into one framework because... Yeah, everyone would ask us that question. And the way we would always answer that question was, well, it depends.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I was just talking to a CEO at a big tech company who said, I was talking to Nicole. And I asked her, to sum it all up, what should we measure? And she told me, it sort of depends. And I get that it's situationally dependent, but it would be really valuable to have something out of the box and standardized that we could benchmark across other companies and
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
really have a way forward so and funny enough i've had that same experience i was talking to a cto actually a capital one who asked me hey i've been following your research for two years so just tell me what should we actually measure and i said uh We can, you know, we can do a consulting engagement on that to like figure it out.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
But, you know, having a starting point that is, you know, out of the box is really valuable. So that's what the DX core for is.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
The problem is no one has time. Well, they all want the silver bullet, right? Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, they want to go to the doctor and get the diagnosis, not go to the doctor and then have 16 follow-up appointments before you get the diagnosis.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
We help people do surveys and collect other types of data on their developers. Just to clarify.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I think the Core 4 provides a pretty good answer. I mean, we want people to customize. This isn't, hey, do this and do nothing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
But the DX Core 4 does... And now we've started rolling it out to people. And it's landed well. I actually asked the CEO, I showed him the core four right after hearing about that experience that they had talking with Nicole. I said, hey, we've been working on something for this. And I asked him, to you as CEO, does this seem right? Does this seem correct?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Does this seem like the right way to be thinking about and measuring developer productivity? And he said, yes.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It spits it out. It spits out your customized core for it. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. The survey is really interesting. One of the first things that came to mind when I read that headline, that 80% of developers being unhappy, was something we see across organizations we work with. Something a little bit similar, we track something around that we call attrition risk. So what is the likelihood of a developer actually leaving a company in the next 12 months?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That's like when, you know, some of those personal wealth front and betterment, some of those robo investment advisor platforms, right? You go through like a three minute wizard and then they tell you what your investment portfolio should be. Should be. So that I like that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. Yeah. Lots of good ideas.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Those are the dimensions. Those are the categories. Right. That, that think of them as your stocks, bonds, cash, right. To use the stock portfolio in the analogy, you need that balance because if you only measure speed, anything else goes to crap. Right. Right. Like you're not good.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. You know, I mean, I was probably last time I was on the show with Adam, I was probably dissing that metric, right? Like PR group, but PR strategy.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I'm a politician, right? You know, I flip flop on the issues. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. But no. So it's been, it's been a journey for, I mean, just for me personally on this topic, because, um, You know, the whole reason I actually got into spending six, seven years on this whole problem space was because I felt like metrics like diffs per engineer were reductive and not correct and not helpful. All right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
But one of the things that the core four optimizes for is so we work with a lot of technical leaders, engineering leaders and engineers. As we were talking about earlier, one of their big challenges is talking about rationalizing investments in developer productivity in a way that the CEO and CFO are going to agree to.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And to do that, you need a shared definition of productivity that your CEO and CFO agree with. And to achieve that, I've found that you do need some type of output measure. We're not at a point in human evolution yet where most CEOs and CFOs are down with this idea that developer experience indexes is the one metric that matters for the maturity or effectiveness of the organization.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
A lot of CFOs and CEOs still think, I mean, there's Fortune 550 companies still measuring lines of code, benchmarking that, right? So we're still at a point in human state of the art around software engineering where output measures need to be a part of that conversation. It needs to be part of the way you're framing developer experience and developer productivity.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
If you want the people you're pitching this to, to actually understand fund it and believe it and buy in. So there's a marketability optimization here. That's one of the reasons PR is for engineers in here. But the other reason is we have come around to talking with a lot of companies like Uber, Microsoft, top tech companies where they use this metric as an input. It's not the sole metric, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
They're not performance valuing engineers based on this metric, but in aggregate, they are looking at this metric as an input to understanding how developer productivity is trending and compares to other organizations. And it's not useless, right? It is a useful indicator in aggregate.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And that's why in the framework in the core four, we there's an asterisk and it says not to measure this at the individual level. So this is only to be looked at at a aggregate team group organization level and benchmark that way. And we've we've found it more useful than not.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Not at the individual level. Right. Well, so, yeah, the metric is normalized. So you're looking at aggregate divided by the population. But in terms of like visualizing or reporting this, you're not looking at a list of people, right? You're looking at teams and organizations. Yeah. Right. I do see the contradiction there, though. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And that number typically hovers around 10 to 15%. Okay. And so one of the first things that came to mind, what are the implications of 80% of developers being happy, right? If only 15% of them are actually going to leave the company, right? And
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I'll write that down.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And I think there's more we can do, right? I was just talking to a company, actually working with a company, Silicon Valley tech company, and all the other core form metrics were quite a bit below like P50, like industry peers, but diffs per engineer was higher.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And this is bad for them because they're trying to show to their executives that they're behind peers so they can get funding to make improvements, right? Sure. So we were just trying to dive into the data. Like, why is your diffs per engineer inflated, even though...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
clearly like empirically and with the other core four data points like you're not like a high performing organization and right so we we couldn't really figure out an answer i mean there was a lot of speculate like you know there's just there a higher number of like config changes like small prs that aren't real changes but like every company has that right like we that should be kind of that uh fuzziness should already be kind of accounted for in our benchmarks and so that led to this idea like
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
you know, could there be a weighted metric? So, so you're actually, because not all dips PRs are credit equal, like we talked about, right? Some are one minute changes. Some are, some are one line changes that are actually eight hours. Some are, you know, 800 line changes that are two minutes.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Like how do you, so, you know, if we could apply some kind of weighting to like bucketing all these dips and PRs. So almost the same way we do estimation, like t-shirt sizes or something like that. You know, I was thinking, could we use Gen AI like LLM to basically automatically try to categorize based on the title, the description of the task and the code changes?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Like, you know, was this like a big change or was this actually a small change? And then you could get kind of like a weighted number. That would be an improvement to the signal you're getting out of like an output measure like this.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That amounts to a lot of unhappy employees who are not doing their best work, who are probably not clocking in the 40, 50 hours that we're hoping for, who may be phoning it in a little bit. So that was interesting to me, just reading that headline.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
We don't know, but they are definitely higher. And I mean, I told them, look, if I had a little bit more time here, I would take a random sample of your 200 PRs and then random sample of other companies and try to do what an LLM would. I would look at the titles and descriptions and try to figure out, are your PRs generally smaller, lower effort or size tasks than other companies?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I mean, that probably has to be the reason. I can't, it's an interesting problem though. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And so they're just, here's the thing. Here's another twist.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Okay. So the, the twist is we measure this two ways. We actually measure diffs per engineer self-reported, meaning we just ask developers, on average, how many PRs do you merge that you were the author of? And we look at their actual GitHub data. And for this company, both numbers were within point. They were the same number. Which is remarkable in of itself, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, not exactly, but within like 0.23, yeah. I mean, why wouldn't it, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, maybe people looked right. Maybe people looked at their own GitHub activity and answer the question.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, it wasn't exactly. So it was it was it was very close. And so that does exclude like bot authored pull requests, for example, and both measures, both the GitHub, the objective one and the self-reported explicitly exclude bot authored.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. Looking at outliers would be interesting, though the self-reported accounts for that because there's an upper bound. Like the top option is actually, I think. like 10, like 10 or more per week. You can't put in like I merge 100 per week.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, it was fascinating.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, that's a good suggestion. We didn't look at the secondary metrics. We got really trapped in, like, why is this diffs per engineer inflated?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. This makes me want to go look at the perceived rate of delivery. Perceived speed is one of those secondary metrics. This is the analogy here would be for like aerobic athletes, right? Heart rate versus perceived rate of exertion, right? Those are the kind of two. And like, there's a lot of flaws in heart rate because I mean, just the altitude, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You could be training at different altitudes and the heart rate's different, even though you're kind of doing the same, same load. Or you just wake up, you didn't get as much sleep, so your heart rate is more fluctuating. So, yeah, we really like that perceived rate of delivery. We literally just ask people to rate the speed at which their team delivers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It's not a five-point scale. It's not... from extremely fast to slow. It's the actual speed.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, very much inspired by perceived rate of exertion, which is on a 10, right? There's 10 options for perceived rate of exertion.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
For medical? I think they use that in healthcare.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Happy and productive, right? I mean, so that's the SAC overflow survey once again confirms this, right? Because people are unhappy because they're unproductive is another way to characterize the findings, right? People are frustrated because it's hard to get work done because of their tools, systems, whatever. Therefore, they're unhappy and they're unproductive, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
There's a lot of time being wasted here. So no, I would say our North Star is helping every... Every organization just become every tech organization become the best version of themselves. Right. I mean, that has different meaning to different people. But, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm the CEO of a company and we have engineers. And so the way I think about it is.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
With the people we have, are we doing the best we absolutely could be? Are we as good as we could be? And we run the DXi and all the core four, and I'm looking at that. How can we get better? To another company that probably just translates to we spend a crap ton of money on engineers, and we want to make sure we're maximizing that investment. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Or it might mean, look, our competitors seem to be like creeping ahead of us. How do we go faster without just hiring more people? So lots of ways to tell the story in like a one liner. But yeah, it's about being good at building software. And as a result of that, people are also happier because all research repeatedly shows that happy developers are productive and productive developers are happy.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
as the Stack Overflow Survey also shows.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. I mean, whenever we look at this type of data, we're slicing and dicing. I mean, you do see some couple things I could share. You know, we do see some differences across, you know, cross culturally. So, for example, we tend to see higher sentiment around this type of stuff, at least self-reported from populations in India, for example.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
we tend to see, you know, higher satisfaction with more junior developers, right? People who just don't have a frame of reference yet on what is good, right? They're still, they're new to the profession. So there's certain things that if we just looked at this data, it might be that the 20% happy are coming from, you know, certain countries or,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
certain levels of tenure and seniority, that could explain quite a bit of that 20. I mean, and some of them are probably legitimately in good situations with good developer experience and greenfield projects with no technical debt where they're really happy.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That's how I've heard this described. How can you kind of get the same feeling of joy and flow that you do when you're working on a side project? How do you get that same experience while working in your job? How can you recreate that? And if we could do that, we would unlock a lot more productivity. We would get a lot more out of engineers working at our companies. Yes.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I think that's a good way to think about it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That's already, yeah. For every organization we work with, that's one of the... So first, we capture the data on it, and then based on... how they you know kind of stack up on each of the 14 we give them hey like based on here's how you answered these 14 now out of these 14 what are the top one to three that you know would most benefit your productivity
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
There are definitely certain ones that tend to float more toward the top.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
For sure. Yeah. What's interesting is, you know, the Stack Overflow kind of technical debt is not one thing, right? Technical debt is actually like all 14 of these things. Well, minus maybe two or three of them are actually types of technical debt, right? So documentation is actually a form of technical debt. Complex code is a form of technical debt. Slow CI CD is a form of technical debt.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So all the technical factors do tend to float toward the top. Actually, but some of the cultural fact, you know, cross-team collaboration, like delays due to different teams having to coordinate with one another is also, I'd say, a pretty common theme. Makes sense.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, good question. These are the people... My response just now was deriving from how engineers report the friction. So from the perspective for developers waiting on other teams, which could be cross-functional or it could just be other engineering teams that they have different services or whatnot. So that tends to be a big area of friction.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Not just meetings. Less meetings, please. No, not just meetings. What else? Yeah. It's people were asking, it can be people actually asking you questions. It can be code reviews. It could be, Hey, can you do, you know, can you fix this quick thing? Can you customer ask for this thing? Can you take care of it? It could be support. It could be incidents. So it's much more than meetings. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That's, that's something we see a lot of companies just say, Oh yeah, we just need like no meetings Wednesday. And then this problem solved. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's really the case. I was actually looking at DX, what our top ranked areas were.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, no. What do our developers say are the biggest areas that should actually be improved? And for us, it's actually that code maintainability. So the ability, how easy it is to actually understand and modify code.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
uh it's actually also project clear project direction so the projects they work on having clear goals and direction and it's actually that batch size which we've since renamed to incremental delivery but you know are you working on kind of small continuous changes as opposed to large ships we're the top three for us those first two are driven by leadership aren't they at me
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I was thinking you're showing us cards here.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll say this. Our DXI score is three points above P90.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, we're sitting really pretty. But yeah, even then, there's always room for improvement, right? And actually, I just, I'm looking at the data now and actually our clear direction.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, those top three I just mentioned actually are not above P90. Those three specifically. Okay. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. And same with code review turnaround actually is not above P90. Here's the better question, really.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. Now, this gives me a lot of reassurance as a leader, actually, because I wasn't sure before we ran this last, we call them snapshots, right? This last kind of benchmarking survey and data collection exercise. I really wasn't sure. I was very pleasantly surprised by how good things are right now. I mean, that's what I would expect out of myself as a leader, right? But I wasn't sure.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Am I just thinking we're good? Is it actually terrible working here? Or are we actually as efficient? Are we actually kind of at that high level of efficiency that I would expect out of the way we do things here? And we are pretty efficient. So it's good to see.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. I mean, the project direction, you know, that's on me. And yeah, I mean, some of you were asking earlier, like Pareto's principle, but like some of these are trade-offs, right? Because yeah, we can improve that, but that would involve a little more process, which would cost time and money. And given that it's already actually very good, you know, is it,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
There's just like it's more like something we want to keep in mind and be aware of so we can just lean in a little bit more there. The code maintainability, like that's already something we're really focused on. So that that was like validating is, you know, that's something we need to continue focusing on is.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Good question. Having clear patterns. I mean, just really pretty strict code review. And not just code review, but just making sure. I don't know if you've seen Addy Osmani's post. Code is like a love letter to the next developer.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. So that's in our onboarding doc for engineering. It's like, look, the only thing that matters here when you write code is like, how easy is it for the other people on the team to understand that code? And we really try to make decisions on how we build things around that principle. So it's good to see that then reflected in in the data, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
People are saying that it is easy for them to understand and modify other people's code here. So that's one of the ways, but yeah, it's a lot of hands-on like driving that principle forward, right? We've, I've vetoed a lot of technical decisions, introducing new technology based on that principle that every new technology we add, every new pattern we add is something else.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Someone else has to learn and is going to slow them down.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So get this. I'm looking at the data. So when I look at our core four, we are above industry P50 for speed, effectiveness and impact, but not quality.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
When I look at our second, some of the secondary metrics, so perceived speed and perceived quality, we are also above P90 on all of them except quality. So, yes, I think we are. We do sacrifice a little bit of quality for the sake of speed. And I mean, that's the data shows that very clearly.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Now, whether that's a problem or not... That's up to you. ...is an interesting question. Yeah, exactly. As a startup, I, you know, I love... I'd much rather be P90 plus on speed right now than... Because we have quality issues, but they're not... They don't affect customers that much. That's the secret about our quality problem.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Like, we do have quality problems, but I actually have the principle on the team, like, look, we're not building payroll software here. Like, when we have a glitch in a report, it's not, like...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
it's not hugely disrupting or impacting our customers businesses and if we can quickly resolve it then we're good so we that's a principle we have here like we have really fast recovery but yeah we do have not great quality objectively speaking yeah not abnormal for a company in your situation i don't think do you have happy developers It's a good question.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So we don't measure, for the reasons I kind of shared some concerns around measuring happiness, we don't measure happiness. Do you have productive developers? Well, so yeah, we do. I mean, our DXI score is through the charts, as I was saying. But we do, I mentioned earlier, we do measure attrition risk. This is interesting. I haven't actually looked at this.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Okay, I see. Yeah. okay i mean this i can't share out loud but okay so for risk of attrition we look at it very similar to like a blood test that you might get so when you get a blood test right they tell you like here's the healthy range right like you know if you're whatever blood pressure cholesterol is within at you know this nanomilligrams to to this you're normal so with attrition risk i
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
The normal range, and I may be having that coffee this morning, but I think it's 7% to 10% is the healthy range. So if your attrition risk is 7% to 10% of your organization has signals of being at risk of attrition, that's normal. And I'll just say we're at the high end of the normal range, but I'm looking at the data.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Our, our reporting will break it to like, tell you where that kind of risk of attrition. And so I'm looking at it now and it's, I, I, I'm aware of what is going on here.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Like he, well, how large is your team? I can't. It's around 20 people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. No, this is meaningful, though. No, this is actually this. I was actually worried about some flight risk. in this area on this team. And this data is actually telling me.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I'm feeling better about our product because today we've gotten to go through all the data. And it's been really, you know, to be honest with you, when I originally got the data, I was so busy. I didn't like fully go through it. But like you guys asking these probing questions.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, me too. Thanks for going through that with us. So yeah, 10% risk of attrition. We'll plot with you every snapshot.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, hopefully. I mean, the way I look at this as a startup is, can we try to not end up like GitHub? Right, that's the goal.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Around their edge velocities specifically, right? I mean, they were at a point where they weren't shipping and people were leaving because it was so hard to ship. Honestly, quite a few companies we work with are kind of in that position, like these big tech companies that went through that hyper growth and churn and
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
tons of reorgs and are now confronting, okay, now we can't just keep hiring people, but we need to be shipping faster. Where do we get? What are the levers we can pull? It's kind of like health, right? If you can get ahead of this stuff and not... You know, we have four decades of, you know, poor diet and exercise that hits you in your 50s.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Like, if we can kind of stay ahead of it, you know, I would hope that we're able to scale the business while staying P90 on velocity, right? That's the goal here right now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I mean, anyone in the developer business, I would say. So, yeah. GitHub? GitHub, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, right? I mean, anyone in the cloud game cares a lot about, like, benchmarking, assessing maturity. Right. Yeah. Even Salesforce is a little bit. Could you IPO? We could. I don't. What do you want to do? I don't know. I'll do whatever fate has in store for us.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
We've pretty much bootstrapped the whole thing. We control our own destiny. We don't have to have an IPO. We don't have to sell for $8 billion. We just want to keep I'm just drawn to this problem. And I think I shared this the last time I was on the show. This all started seven years ago when I first became the CTO at a startup.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And the CEO asked me, hey, Avi, all the other departments here are reporting metrics each month. Can you start reporting some metrics on the productivity of your engineering team? That was seven years ago. And so I joke with people. I'm still just trying to answer that question because I couldn't answer that question. seven, eight years ago. Right. I asked other CTOs, what are you reporting?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And got 20 different answers. And it was a hard problem.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I'm the majority.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I have a co-founder, but yeah, I'm the majority owner.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
No, it might have been my previous business, the Pull Panda. That was the singular owner of that. But no, this one, I've had a business partner uh, since the beginning.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You said bootstrap venture capital. Just, we took a little bit of angel investment at the very beginning from, you know, friends and family. Yeah. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. Now we're extremely cashflow positive. And I mean, like to the point where my biggest concern each year is how to spend some of that. So we don't pay taxes, corporate, you know, 20% tax rate. Cause that just gets, goes in the chest. So yeah, we, I try to reinvest it. So we don't, it's better to reinvest it than pay, lose 20%.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
We could just call it developer experience index.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It's interesting. Yeah, the question was, how satisfied are you in your current professional developer role?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And the options were not happy at work, complacent at work, and happy at work. So actually, of that 80% who are reported to be unhappy, 47% are complacent. So they didn't say they were unhappy. They said, meh.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
can do what we love all the time and it feels like i would do this if i wasn't getting paid for it like that's not the normal and so just being kind of meh with your job is it could be worse right maybe worse what i think is really interesting is the why right so so why are developers satisfied or unsatisfied in their in their jobs and i think
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
The first images that pop into our minds might be pay or managers or layoffs or AI. But if I'm reading this correctly, the top contributors to satisfaction are actually the developer experience or technical data, right? The tooling, the complexity of the systems and the code base. Am I reading that correctly? Is that how you guys read it?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Maybe. Yeah. Two decades of move fast, break things, hire a lot of people, churn a lot of people. Churn. Reorg many times. And now everything's a mess.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. Yeah. So we we're focused on measuring the developer experience. A lot of the things listed here, you know, difficulty of understanding code or developer environments, CICD. strategy on the team, a lot of these things are aspects of the developer experience we measure for lots of different companies. And then we correlate the two.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So we correlate these different aspects or facets of developer experience against who's at risk of leaving and who's actually left. And our data actually aligns quite a bit with what I'm looking at here with the SEC overflow report. Yeah, the difficulty of doing work as a developer seems to be the preeminent cause of regrettable attrition for companies.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Not pay, not liking your manager, not stock compensation. It often is just the difficulty of actually doing work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Makes it harder to be productive.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, when it's not getting better. I mean, it's demoralizing for developers. It's also demoralizing for leaders I talk to who run, are getting this type of data at their companies and quarter after quarter, despite making efforts to make improvements around this stuff, the data keeps coming back that things are slow. People are frustrated. It's hard to get work done.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
At GitHub, I think I told this story to you before, Adam. Tell it again. At GitHub, we had a lot of these problems. Developer tooling, getting releases out, the builds, developer environments. People were leaving, and they were telling leaders that they were leaving because it was hard to get things done at GitHub. This is back in 2020, if I'm getting my years right. Well, hindsight's 2020.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Mm-hmm. And what we ended up doing, we froze features for a quarter. All of GitHub engineering, no features. Whole quarter spent fixing these problems. It was dramatic, right? And things got a lot better as a result. Yeah. Another example is actually Atlassian. Their CTO is very public about how they're focusing on developer productivity, developer experience.