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In the weeks to come, we’ll be taking a closer look at developer productivity — what works and what doesn’t. View in browser »
The New Stack Update

ISSUE 312: The Productivity Trap

Talk Talk Talk

“Once you have a public area, there is a central battlefield for people to fight over. Spammers, partisans, griefers and creeps are going to use those features to try to get attention.”

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Open source advocate Evan Prodromou, on the “Challenges of Creating a Decentralized, Open Source Twitter
What's Happening

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we take a look at what to expect from this year’s KubeCon EU 2022. Our guests for this podcast are Priyanka Sharma, the executive director of CNCF, and Ricardo Rocha, who is a KubeCon co-chair and computer engineer at CERN. TNS Editor-in-Chief Joab Jackson hosted this podcast.

We also discuss what to expect from the virtual sessions at the conference, what to do in Valencia, the current state of Kubernetes, and we get some unofficial picks from Sharma and Rocha as to what keynotes not to miss and what sessions to attend.

We recorded this podcast prior to the discussion around masks, and at the time, Sharma said that the CNCF based the mask ruling on Spain’s country-wide mandates. “So we are being very cautious with the health requirements for the event,” she said.

Bring a mask to KubeCon. And it is still a requirement to show proof of vaccination, and temperature checks will be made as well.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022 Europe, in Valencia: Bring a Mask

The Productivity Trap

Measuring productivity is a tricky business.

Back in the early days of our journalism career, we worked for a consumer magazine, where a 100+ page book of articles had to be shipped to the printer each month. It was a high-productivity and arguably an inherently stressful environment.

The Editor-in-Chief, for instance, seemed very stressed. He took pride, for instance, in working at his desk late into the evenings. Oblivious to the impending printer deadline — a very expensive one to miss — he would toil on his computer to shape good stories into great ones. The rest of us would feel bad for leaving at 6 pm, with the editor alone sacrificing his personal time to the greater good of the magazine. His late-night labors, which he always humble-bragged about in the meetings, were a clearly an indication that this magazine was a place where you’d expect to work long hours.

But here’s the thing: This same Editor-in-Chief also took long leisurely lunches with writers and advertisers. He’d immerse himself in lengthy bull sessions with the editorial staff, even take in an afternoon baseball game at the downtown stadium a few blocks away — as a break from all his hard work!

Compare him to the Managing Editor of the very same magazine, who made it a point to never work more than 40 hours a week. She’d come first thing in the morning, stay focused and knock out everything on her considerable To-Do list and hit the elevators by 5:30 pm. None of those ballyhooed late nights for her, yet she was clearly the most productive employee there. She didn’t seem all that stressed either.

Who was the most productive? Depends on how you measure productivity, I guess.

The question of how to measure the productivity of developers has become a hot topic again, we noticed. Microsoft Research partner Dr. Nicole Forsgren wrote, in a paper for ACM Queue that “Unfortunately, after decades of research and practical development experience, knowing how to measure productivity or even define developer productivity has remained elusive, while myths about the topic are common.”

What makes for a productive programmer? Lines of code? Hours worked? Successful branch mergers?

In her paper, she decries the use of simple metrics. As Charles Goodhart pointed out, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to measure anything of value. Instead, she created a more holistic framework for measuring developer productivity, called SMART, which takes in expected factors such as flow and satisfaction, but also some surprising ones, such as developer well-being and satisfaction.

In the weeks to come, we’ll be taking a closer look at developer productivity — what works and what doesn’t. Let us know what works for you: editors@thenewstack.io.

Java 18: Don’t Sleep on the Simple Web Server

When Oracle released Java 18 last month, one of its slightly overlooked but interesting new features was the Simple Web Server. Oracle introduced the Simple Web Server via Java Enhancement Protocol (JEP) 408. The JEP 408 proposal describes the Simple Web Server as providing a command-line tool and API to start a minimal web server that serves static files only.  The tool is intended for use in prototyping, ad-hoc coding and testing, particularly in educational contexts, Oracle said.

The Rise of Smart Cloud Native Apps

Just like the internet and cloud technology that gave rise to Netflix, Spotify, LinkedIn and Amazon, many of the AI-powered products depend on applications running in the cloud to make them work. Tobi Knaup, CEO of D2IQ, calls them smart cloud native apps. He explains that smart cloud native apps have AI at their core, are continuously deployed and are dynamically managed by a smart cloud native platform. They are the future.

TAI Development Needs to Focus More on Data, Less on Models

To be successfully used by most businesses, artificial intelligence needs to be less focused on building models and more focused around data, said Andrew Ng in his talk at Insight Partners’ ScaleUp:AI conference held in New York earlier this month. This approach will be key to finally brining AI to most businesses.

On The Road
PulumiUP // MAY 04-05  // VIRTUAL

MAY 04-05  // VIRTUAL

PulumiUP

PulumiUP is a free, virtual conference open to all interested in cloud engineering, cloud infrastructure, software development, modern applications or Pulumi. Register today!

Pure Dev // MAY 11 // VIRTUAL @ 9:00 AM PT | 12 PM ET

MAY 11 // VIRTUAL @ 9:00 AM PT | 12 PM ET

Pure Dev

Join Pure Dev to hear how the next generation of storage and data services can accelerate developer speed and maximize productivity. Register today!

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