Cloud Native Computing Foundation BackstageCon NA 2022, 26 Oct 2022

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From YouTube: Keynote: Building for Developer Happiness - Dave Zolotusky, Principal Engineer, Spotify

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from April 17-21. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Keynote: Building for Developer Happiness - Dave Zolotusky, Principal Engineer, Spotify

Now almost 15 years into the cloud computing revolution, we know that — while new technologies, architectural patterns, and engineering org designs solve a lot of problems for developers— they create some new ones too. When new stuff is introduced as tech becomes smarter and more powerful, complexities arise and cognitive overhead increases resulting in a bad developer experience. Even agile approaches reach their limit. And everyone feels the pain.

As the world’s largest audio streaming company, Spotify has grown rapidly over the last decade and definitely hasn’t been immune to these trends. But instead of slowing down during growth as most companies do, Spotify has been accelerating in its product development with developer retention rates that are well above industry averages.

In this keynote, Spotify will share more on its culture and focus on better developer experience, which is — in a nutshell — really about making developers happy at work.

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All right so yes I'm another Dave to talk about backstage so, like I, said I'm Dave I'm, a software engineer at Spotify and I've been working with backstage since well since before it was called backstage anyway. I'm really really excited that we finally got this conference together.

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We've been talking about backstage con for years and I'm just really proud, and really ecstatic to see this many people here for this, but anyway I'm going to talk a little bit about developer, Effectiveness and what it means for us at Spotify and then I'm going to share some pretty exciting news.

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But we all know why we're here to talk about backstage today. Developers have never been more vital.

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It seems like every business is now a software business, at least in some way, and if your developers are lost or unhappy or just generally unproductive, then you're, probably not keeping Pace with your competition, much less innovating and really leading at the same time being a developer has never been harder. The complexity that we developers face on a day-to-day basis has exploded over the years and as your business grows and you bring on more technology, more features, more customers grow to Greater scale and hire more developers.

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It only gets more and more complicated for all of those. Developers Spotify, of course, has grown rapidly over the years and definitely has not been immune to these Trends, but instead of slowing down during our growth as most companies do, we've been accelerating product development, with developer retention rates that have defied industry averages and talk a little bit about how we've done that.

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I think the most important part has been our focus on developer effectiveness and the way we Define developer Effectiveness as a function of developer productivity and this other concept that we simply refer to as developer happiness, and we measure it in a bunch of different quantitative and qualitative ways internally at Spotify. But we believe that for developers, fulfillment or happiness typically means just creating things. Writing code shipping, great products because, for everyone being empowered to do your best work matters but I think for us developers being empowered to innovate, to experiment to try new things.

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Really. Matters like a lot I think toil and friction get in the way of these things and really really reduce developer. Friction a developer happiness and effectiveness simply put unhappy developers, don't do their best work and can't produce happy code and backstage exemplifies much of that Spotify culture. It's built around that our autonomous and agile weights of working, our belief that Engineers should have the power to pick the right tools for their job, but also our build something attractive and they will come approach to building out our platform.

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To always ensuring that the tools in the Spotify platform are the right tools for the job and the ones that our developers will pick and, of course, our focus on developers as humans, who deserve a great experience, just like our consumers do, and in the nearly three years since we open sourced it backstage, has become a mature and thriving platform. That's helped other organizations inject little pieces of that developer. Culture into their own and now we're seeing these amazing numbers that Suzanne showed earlier, like the 400 plus adopters, the 1500 plus contributors.

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All of these numbers people from around the world using this core framework to build better experiences for hundreds or thousands of their fellow Developers, and our goal with backstage has always been pretty simple.

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We want to make it a critical part of every developer's daily workflow and to help developers everywhere be happier and be more effective and last year, when we first shared our intent to commercialize and to sell products for backstage, we talked about how we've only just begun tapping into the potential of Backstage and sharing what it has done for us at Spotify with everyone else in the world.

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So today, I want to announce the next step on that Journey and that's Spotify plugins for backstage a subscription that will soon be available in beta to all backstage adopters.

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The Spotify plug-in subscription includes a collection of homegrown plugins that we've relied on for years at Spotify, as well as some new ones designed to unlock even more value for companies adopting backstage.

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And, of course, we love a good freemium model at Spotify, so these plugins are designed to complement the free and open source plugins that you already enjoy, bringing even more of spotify's experience and maturity with the backstage platform to everyone else in these plugins. They do a lot of things, but they're really aimed at things like enhancing backstage's usability, solving common developer challenges, reducing operational toil and improving collaboration across adopting organizations.

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We've used internal versions of these plugins for years, with hundreds or thousands of spotifiers using them daily or weekly. So you can trust that they're battle tested and have gone through an endless amount of iteration with Spotify before your teams get to them. We built these plugins so that you don't have to. We want you and your teams to move faster and to make backslides stickier and more impactful within your organizations without having every other organization duplicate work that we've already done at Spotify.

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I can't pick too many favorite children, but to call it a few of these sound check. It's a great plugin that helps you ensure that all your software is built to the engineering standards that you expect at your organizations while making it easy for the engineers to know about those standards and to follow them. Skill exchange is a great way to ensure that your r d Community is always motivated and always working on something fun, exciting and just as importantly, critical to your business and pulse pulse lets.

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You make sure that all the rest of the stuff is working well. It'll tell you if your developers really are happy which, where we started today, is really the key to that happy code, so for more information check out today's blog post, that just went live about Spotify plugins for backstage and follow that blog to stay updated on our progress. But the most important thing to remember is that we'll be hosting a launch event on December 15th, where we'll have a lot more information about the plugins and how to sign up for the subscription.

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So thank you and I hope you enjoy the rest of backstagecon.