Sleuth’s Post

Hard to believe I'm almost 3 months in at LD and want to share a few takeaways I've learned. While software leadership prioritizes both efficiency at scale and reduced risk, feature management becomes a critical piece of the equation. Enabling teams to rapidly release shorter lived branches and transition to trunk based development is made possible through feature flagging. In doing so we can "dark launch" features, and safely release through targeting and progressive rollouts to reduce risk and mitigate regressions before they become customer incidents. Any platform that can do this easily and automate those mitigations (looking at you Release Guardian) is going to become essential to DevOps workflows. All of this helps teams actually reduce their COGS as software costs reduce with developer efficiency. As we start to see the down stream effects of greater velocity through feature management, experimentation is really where we can start to dial in the efficacy of software teams. Without an understanding of the impact of feature releases on the business, our increased velocity lacks the insight to help product teams prioritize and make informed decisions. By building experimentation on top of feature management, we gain the ability to analyze the effects of new releases on the customer experience, measure outcomes that matter to the business, and ultimately optimize our ability to generate revenue. It's especially important that we consider the effects of how we implement experimentation to ensure we can trust the data that is driving product decisions. This is why it's so critical we have a platform that can enable both targeting and feature variations on the code level as it ensures the outcomes of experiments are purely being driven by our feature releases, not unintended latency or UI glitches from a bootstrapped feature flag. It's always exciting to start to sink your teeth in as you get ramped at a new role, and am very thankful for all the resources and support here at LaunchDarkly to help make the firehose a bit more manageable! Lastly, if you're curious how your team's own software practice measures up against today's priorities of risk and velocity we have a very cool guide to actually measure that here: https://lnkd.in/eKhNN4Dv #devops #featureflagging #experimentation #dora

Sound familiar? These are the six most common friction points we see in a developer's journey during our audits. Poor documentation always comes up, but my bugaboo is the lack of a developer portal. Developers need a solid landing page to let them know they've come to the right spot, they understand what your technology/tool is and why they would want to use it. AND it provides direction on what to do next. What friction point is your bugaboo? #devrel #DX

Elevating developer experience and productivity requires a keen understanding of where to focus efforts and the ability to quantify the impact of changes. 🎯 So where do engineering organizations start? In the attached resource, DX's CTO Laura Tacho dives into frameworks like DORA, SPACE, and DevEx. This expert guide outlines different approaches to defining and measuring developer productivity. This guide will share insight into: ▶ Widely used frameworks in software engineering organizations ▶ Who should leverage each framework ▶ Implementation strategies for each framework ▶ Key considerations when selecting a developer productivity framework Navigate developer insights with confidence and empower your team to thrive! #Frameworks #DeveloperProductivity #DeveloperEmpowerment #DevEx https://lnkd.in/gGxGAh_J

Building a Platform Engineering tool could be as simple as a CLI. The goal doesn’t have to be to build something big. You just have to build something that makes the lives of internal engineers and developers easier at your organization. I break down an example of how to think about building a tool in the video below 👇🏻 https://buff.ly/4e4WwX3 #kubernetes #devops #platformengineering

⚡ Did you know that small pull requests can drive innovation and productivity? It's true! By focusing on smaller batch sizes and closer collaboration, teams can enjoy faster feedback and better reviews. So why not try using the enabler code last to create small pull requests? It's a game-changer! 🚀 https://buff.ly/3POUEaH #Innovation #Productivity #EnablerCodeLast #smallerPR #pullRequests

Are you interested in #developerportals? Join me at #portaltalks for a great 2-day event with some of the best minds in the industry. Some of the great topics include: - What should I ask developers when planning the portal? - What comes first - portal or platform? - The portal as a product playbook Have any questions on DevPortals or DevEx? Let me know, I would be glad to chat about it.

Imagine a startup where the default was debugging on live servers 🤦🏻♂️   Unpredictable slowdowns were the norm.   Customer complaints were frequent.   The sales team was constantly on edge, shouting across the room for immediate fixes.   One unforgettable day, I discovered a debugger actively running on a live server and had to step outside just to regain my composure.   Fast forward to the present —   Shouting across the room has ceased, replaced by clear, structured processes and well-defined responsibilities.   Operations are smooth and service responses are predictably quick.   Customer satisfaction has increased.   Team stress is markedly lower.   Efficiency has soared.   The road to this transformation was paved with intentional adjustments and tactical overhauls.   Here are some basic processes we implemented:   1) Dedicated debugging environment → Developers no longer needed to experiment in live, fishing around for elusive problems.   2) Improved metrics and logging → Proactively identified customer issues, enabling a risk weighted bug-fix process.   3) Static code analysis → Uncovered and explained bugs previously masked by complex code interactions.   4) Structured escalation process → Customer issues were triaged, escalated according to rules, and handled within agreed service levels.   Fixing these basic best practices created the foundation for additional process improvements later:   🔹 Automated testing and CI/CD 🔹 Performance monitoring 🔹 Blameless retrospectives 🔹 Feature flagging 🔹 User behaviour analytics   Has your team encountered similar hurdles?   I’d love to hear your stories and facepalm moments.   Share them in the comments!   (Hat tip to Jean-Luc Picard for the ultimate facepalm photo collection!)   P.S. If you like this post, ♻️ reshare & 🔔 follow me, Adam Horner as I talk about life as a CTO.

How do you measure the success of an API platform? Here are four key indicators to track. 📈

The latest update for #Speedscale includes "The Ultimate Guide to Performance #RegressionTesting" and "Top 8 #API Mocking Tools and Methodologies". #DevOps #Kubernetes #Testing https://lnkd.in/edzJMES

Call all of my Kubernetes and cloud-native application builders and Platform Engineers out here. A SIMPLE BUT IMPORTANT FAVOR TO ASK OF YOU 👇 🙏 Please reshare if you can, because this is big. Here's the quick story and a small ask: I've been lucky enough to meet amazing people in my career. One of the best things of being close to so many innovative teams is that I am adjacent, or directly contributing to a constant stream of knowledge and ideas. This is why helping people and their companies has become such a valuable differentiator to just pushing out content with a sole purpose of satisfying some algorithm. One of my amazing GTM Delta clients is Causely. I'm a fan. I was a fan before they were a client so it is like a perfect pairing to be able to directly help grow their reach as well. If you're operating Kubernetes and want to be an early access partner to develop the future of application reliability with a super cool platform that automates root cause analysis and remediation...do these quick 2 things: 1. Check out the platform sizzle reel we collaborated and let me know what you think: https://lnkd.in/gnrXzuDR 2. Get into the development program by requesting a demo We are also looking for folks who want to try things out and share their thoughts with community blogs. It's super cool, and I'm so proud of the team that are making this platform a reality. #PlatformEngineering #DevOps #Kubernetes #K8s #CloudNative #Observability #ApplicationReliability