/Productivity

Measuring Developer Productivity And Happiness At LinkedIn

- Viktoras Truchanovicius tl;dr: We developed a new internal product called the Developer Insights Hub. It visualizes developer experience and happiness metrics describing key developer activities such code building, reviewing, publishing, as well as the sentiment towards the tools being used… this post provides an overview of how we approached metrics selection and design, system architecture and key product features.

featured in #407

Slack

- Martin Fowler tl;dr: “A common approach with timeboxed iterations is to allocate as many user stories as possible to each iteration in order to maximize the utilization of the staff involved. Slack is the policy of deliberately leaving time that isn't allocated for stories, using that time for unplanned work. Although this seems inefficient, it usually yields a significant improvement for the productivity of a team.”

featured in #406

Time Is Emphasis: Planning Your Calendar As A Leader

- Molly Graham tl;dr: “The study analyzed the calendars of 27 CEOs, coding 60,000 hours. The study found that having explicit priorities and structure for your calendar and evaluating how you spend your time are some of the most important things you can do to end up spending the majority of your time on your strategic priorities.” Molly gives templates and examples.

featured in #406

Async Standup Reports For Fewer Status Meetings

tl;dr: Automated team progress updates via Slack or any chat you use. Make sure less time is spent on meetings and more on building.

featured in #388

What Is Code Visibility?

- Shanea Leven tl;dr: Onboarding to a new codebase often involves hours of frustration. But, it doesn’t have to. Shanea explains how code visibility tooling keeps codebases from becoming untouchable black boxes. With a shared visual model that can be maintained through code iterations, developers can be more productive and ship code with fewer bugs.

featured in #383

Visual Workflow Automation. Now With Code.

tl;dr: Build powerful automations fast, with all the hackability you’d expect as a developer. Stop provisioning infrastructure and maintaining one-off scripts. Write and automate cron jobs, custom alerts, and ETL tasks 10x faster with Retool Workflows.

featured in #381

5 Ways To Increase Velocity By Removing The Bottlenecks  In Your QA Process

- Kirk Nathanson tl;dr: With a recession looming and many companies freezing their hiring plans, savvy teams can look at other levers to increase velocity and improve product quality. Here are five cost-effective changes you can make.

featured in #377

Devpod: Improving Developer Productivity at Uber with Remote Development

tl;dr: "In this blog, we share how we improved the daily edit-build-run developer experience using DevPods, our remote development environment. We will start with some of the initial challenges, the pain points we addressed with Devpod, our architecture, and some of our recent successes in terms of adoption and cost reduction. We will finally leave you with some thoughts around the future of remote development at Uber."

featured in #377

Experiment: The Hidden Costs Of Waiting On Slow Build Times

- Natalie Somersall tl;dr: Senior Solutions Engineer at GitHub conducted an experiment to understand tradeoffs between productivity and hardware. "When you ask a developer whether they’d prefer more or less powerful hardware, the answer is almost always more powerful hardware. More powerful hardware means less time waiting on builds - and that means more time to build the next feature or fix a bug. But even if the upfront cost is higher for higher-powered hardware, what’s the actual cost when you consider the impact on productivity?"

featured in #374

My Energy Is A Linear Function, Until It Isn't

- James Stanier tl;dr: Monday to Wednesday are high energy, productive days for James, but Thursday is an inflection point where he's tiring. James discusses how he's trying to rectify this: (1) Purposefully trying to work 10% slower. (2) Being stricter with notifications so there's less context switching. (3) Limiting checking messages to within working hours. (4) Deferring non-essential requests and tasks into the following week. (5) Pomodoro technique.

featured in #354