Software Engineering Unlocked

Make code reviews your superpower at awesomecodereviews.com!

Episode Resources:
Paper on improving developer experience
Abi's thoughts on the DX paper
Abi Noda's LinkedIn
Abi's podcast for Engineering Enablement leaders

About Abi Noda
Abi Noda is the CEO and founder of DX, a company that helps measure and improve developer experience.

Earn additional income by sharing your opinion on userinterviews.com!

Episode Resources:
What is platform engineering?
What is an internal developer platform?
What is Dynamic Configuration Management?
Salesman tricks for the Platform Engineer
Platform Engineering community
PlatformCon 2023
Luca’s LinkedIn and Twitter

About Luca Galante
Luca is leading product at Humanitec, saw hundreds of DevOps and platform setups, and shares his learnings in his weekly newsletter PlatformWeekly (with 10k subscribers). He is also the core contributor to the Platform Engineering community, with 10k+ meetup members, and 8k+ Slack members.

Make code reviews your superpower at awesomecodereviews.com!

Other episodes you'll enjoy

Can Engineering metrics be ethical?

Measure developer productivity using the SPACE framework

High-performing engineering teams through DX

Earn additional income by sharing your opinion on userinterviews.com!

Episode Resources:
Nadia's Book
Nadia's website
Nadia's Twitter

About Nadia Zhuk
Nadia is a software engineer at Intercom, and was previously working at Zendesk. Before, Nadia was an English teacher, and journalist, until she decided to learn programming and enter the tech world.

Make code reviews your superpower at awesomecodereviews.com!

Other episodes you'll enjoy

Do code reviews frustrate developers?

The Secret To High-Quality Code

Vulnerability disclosure with Katie Moussouris

Earn additional income by sharing your opinion on userinterviews.com!

Episode Resources:
Alexander's Twitter
Alexander's Research
Awesome Code Reviews
Papers:
An exploratory study on confusion in code reviews
Emotions and Perceived Productivity of Software Developers at the Workplace
Recognizing developers' emotions while programming
Gendered Experiences of Software Engineers During the COVID-19 Crisis
Developer experience research paper  

About Alexander Serebrenik
Alexander is a Full Professor of Social Software Engineering at the Software Engineering and Technology cluster of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Alexander’s research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development.

Earn additional income by sharing your opinion on userinterviews.com!

Episode Resources:
Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity
Alpha-Omega Projects
Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa)
Tools to create SBOM  

About Barak Brudo
Barak Brudo helps organizations secure their software supply chain. He works as a Developer Relations Advocate at Scribe Security.

Other episodes you'll enjoy

• What developers should know about security
• The Secret To High-Quality Code
• Vulnerability disclosure with Katie Moussouris
   

Earn additional income by sharing your opinion on userinterviews.com!

Episode Resources:
Heather's Twitter
Heather's job search blog post
Heather's Blog

About Heather Reid
Heather Reid is a Test Engineer at Glofox. Before that she was the community boss for Ministry of Testing, making sure that the testing community had everything to be successful. Before that, she was a software tester at Exploristics and at Moola.

Episode Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
02:00 What does a test community boss do?
06:28 Can we forget our skills?
08:00 Attending workshops
09:00 4-hour interview experience
10:00 Hurtful rejections pile up
12:10 Can't ask questions in an interview
14:00 A good interview experience
19:00 A technical test
23:00 Different backgrounds and perspectives
26:10 Arguing during an interview
30:50 Improving the state of testing 33:50 Adding accessibility 40:00 Career advice for job seekers

This episode samples:

• Alvaro Trigo, who once was a web developer but could quit his day job to work on his open source software Fullpage.js.
• Daniel Vassallo tells us why he left his cushy job at Amazon to start many small businesses.
• Dagna Bieda explains how you can fast-track your engineering career and what mindset has to do with professional growth.
• Mauricio Aniche explains how to write tests that find bugs and what domain-driven testing is.
• Nuchals Dular shares why the engineering manager position he worked hard toward to wasn’t meant for him.
  
  YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/XKKFCmvK7_M

Make code reviews your superpower at awesomecodereviews.com!

About Michael Lynch
Michael is a software engineer and entrepreneur. He has launched several businesses after leaving Google in 2018. His hardware/software business, called TinyPilot, lets you control any computer remotely and has brought him the most success so far.

Episode Resources:
Michael's Twitter
How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human
Tiny Pilot

Book your awesomecodereviews.com workshop!

Episode Resources:
Multitudes
Lauren's Twitter
Developer experience research paper
DORA metrics
SPACE developer productivity framework

About Lauren Peate
Lauren is the CEO and founder of Multitudes. Her goal is to empower engineering teams to be high-performing through a people-first way to software performance metrics. Lauren’s worked with tech teams around the world, from Silicon Valley to the Middle East and now New Zealand.

​This episode is sponsored by Fiberplane. Your platform for collaborative debugging notebooks!

Episode Resources:

• Try Fiberplane here
• Fiberplane website
• Fiberplane Docs
• NP-hard Ventures

About Micha Hernandez van Leuffen
Micha Hernandez van Leuffen is the founder and CEO of Fiberplane. He previously founded Wercker, a container-native CI/CD platform that was acquired by Oracle. Micha has dedicated his career to improving the workflows of developers.

Read the whole episode (Transcript)

[If you want, you can help make the transcript better, and improve the podcast’s accessibility via Github. I’m happy to lend a hand to help you get started with pull requests, and open source work.]

[00:00:00] Michaela: Hello and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked Podcast. I'm host, Dr. McKayla, and today I have the pleasure to talk to Micha Hernandez van Leuffen. He is the founder and CEO of Fiberplane. He previously was the founder of Wercker, a container native CI/CD platform that was acquired by Oracle. Micha has dedicated his career to improving the workflow of developers, so he and I have a lot to talk about today.

I'm really, really happy that he's here today and he's also sponsoring today's episode. Welcome to the show. I'm happy that you're here, Micha.

[00:00:36] Micha: Thank you for having me. Excited to be on the show.

[00:00:38] Michaela: Yeah, I'm really, really excited. So, Micha, I wanted to start really from the beginning. So you are the CEO of Fiberplane and you are the founder of Wercker, which you already sold.

So, can you tell me a little bit about how you actually started to this entrepreneur journey of yours and what brought you to the developer experience area.

[00:01:03] Micha: Yeah, sure thing. So I have a background in computer science and I did my so, I'm originally from Amsterdam, but I did my thesis at USF.

And the topic was autonomous resource provision using software containers. This was all before Docker was a thing, you know, the container format that we now know and love. And I sort of got excited by that field of, of so containers and decided to start a company around it. That company was Worker, so container native CI/CD platform.

So we helped developers build tests and deploy their applications to the cloud. We went, I would say, so we went through various iterations of the platform. You know, eventually, you know, we started off with Lxc as a container format and then eventually ended up, you know, having to, to platform on Docker.

And Kubernetes. But, you know, it was quite a, quite a journey. So that company eventually got acquired by Oracle to bolster their cloud native strategy. And then, you know, spent a couple years in a Bay area as a VP of software development focusing on their cloud native efforts.

Tried to do a little bit of open source there as well, and then, you know, move back to Europe. And so sort of started thinking about what's. Did some angel investing. We're still doing some angel investing as well actually in the sort of same arena. So developer tools, infrastructure building blocks for tomorrow.

So I run a, a small precede seat fund with to other friends of mine. But then also started, you know, thinking about what to build next. And you know, we can get into that, but sort of from our experience at running work or this sort of large distributed. Sort of fiber plane was, was born.

[00:02:26] Michaela: Cool. Yeah. And so how, how was the acquisition for you? I, from the time I'm, you said you were studying at the university, but then did you write out of university, you know, start worker or maybe already while

[00:02:40] Micha: you were Yeah. More or less studying? Yeah. Yeah, more or less just out of university. So it was around 20, 20 12, 20 13.

And then, you know, expanded the team. Of course we got an office in San Francisco and, and London. And then 2017 we got acquired by Whirlpool. Oh,

[00:02:56] Michaela: very cool. Wow. Cool. So, and you were the, you were the founder of that and also probably cto, CEO. At, at the beginning you were one person shop, or was this, or have this idea and I get some funding and I already, you know, have a team when I'm starting out, or was it more bootstrapped way?

How, how was that?

[00:03:16] Micha: Yeah, yeah. We both gates, both fiber plane and, and, and worker. We got some funding early on. Then eventually got a CTO. For worker was one of the co-founders of, of OpenStack. So also, you know, very early in the, in that sort of, mm-hmm. container and, and cloud infrastructure journey.

And then if for fiber plane, Yeah. There, there's no cto. I'm. I'm both CEO and cto, I guess

[00:03:38] Michaela: at the same time. Yeah. Cool, cool. Can you tell me a little bit about fiber plane? What is fiber plane? You know, what does, what does it has to do with containers and with developer experience? What, what kind of of a product is it?

[00:03:51] Micha: Yeah, sure thing. So, so guess coming back to the worker days, right? So we, we, you know, we're running this distributed system cic cd, so we were also running users arbitrary code. You know, any, any sort of job could happen on the platform on top of Kubernetes, inside of containers. So one of the things that, you know, stuck with me was it was very hard to always sort of debug the system, like figure out what's really going on when we had some kind of issue.

You know, we've going back and forth between metrics, logs, traces, trying to figure out what is the root cause of an issue. So sort of that, that was sort of one thing. So we're thinking a lot about, you know, surely there must be a better way to, to, to help you on this, on this journey. . The other thing that I started thinking about a lot was sort of just challenge the assumption of the dashboard, mm-hmm.

So if you think about it, like a lot of the monitoring observability tools are modeled after the dashboard, like sort of cockpit like view of your infrastructure. But I'd say that those are great for the known knowns. So dashboard is great. You set it up in advance, you know exactly what's gonna go wrong.

These are the things to monitor. These are the things, you know, to keep tabs on. But then reality hits and you know, the thing that you're looking at, at the dashboard is not necessarily a thing that's. Going wrong. Right? So started thinking a lot about you know, what, what is a better form factor to support that sort of more investigative explorative debugging of your infrastructure.

And not to say that dashboards don't have their place, right? It's like still that sort of cockpit view of your infrastructure. I think that's a, a good thing to have. But for debugging, you might wanna sort of more explorative a form factor that also gives you actionable intelligence. I think the other thing that you see a lot with dashboards, like everybody's monitoring everything and now you get a lot of signal and a lot of inputs, but not necessarily the actionable intelligence to figure out what's going on.

So that's sort of the other piece where it, then the other, like, the third like I would say is collaboration sort of thing that stuck with. Was also like we've come to enjoy tools like Notion, you know, Google Docs obviously. You know, in the design space we got Figma where collaboration is built in from the get go and it is found that it was kind of odd how in the developer tools and then sort of specifically DevOps.

We don't really have sort of these collab collaboration not really built in. Right. If you think about it you know, the status quo of, of you and I debugging an issue is we get on, you know, we get on a. You share your screen you open some dashboard and we started talking over it or something.

Right. And so it's, and it's, you know, I guess sort of covid accelerated his thinking a bit, but you know, of everybody going remote you know, how can you make that experience more collaborative?

[00:06:22] Michaela: Mm-hmm. . So it's in the incident space, it's in the monitoring space, and you want to bring more collaboration.

So how does it work? Yeah,

[00:06:32] Micha: yeah, yeah, exactly. So what's your solution now? Yeah. Now I've explained sort of the in inception. Yeah. But yeah, but what is it? What is it? Right. So it's, it's it's a notebook form factor. So very much inspired by data science, right? Like rc, like Jupiter. Yeah, we can Jupyter Notebooks.

Yeah. Think of, think of that form factor. Mm-hmm. . We don't use Jupyter or anything like that. We've written everything from scratch. But it's a sort of, yeah, a notebook form factor and you know, built in with collaboration. So you can add, mention people like you would on Slack. You can leave, you know, comments or discussions and all and all that.

But where it gets interesting, we've got these things called providers, which are effectively plugins. So they're web assembly bundles, which we can sort of dive into into that as well. But they're providers that connect to your infrastructure, right? So we have, for instance, a provider for Elastic Search for your logs.

We have a provider for Prometheus for your. And it allows you to connect to these observab