Mark O'Neill’s Post

In the Gartner Boston office leading an investor session on APIs and AI. Discussion ranged from eBPF to Private Equity rollups to AI Gateways. And a great view too!

Interesting new developer productivity research:

Developer Productivity or Developer Experience? Red Pill or Blue Pill? I've noticed some "red pilling" happening recently, with a new focus on metrics such as revenue-per-developer. This is despite 87% of surveyed organizations saying they've lost standout employees to poor developer experience (source: https://lnkd.in/e728Snyd) and developer experience widely being seen as the flipside of developer productivity. [ Image from The Matrix via Wired Magazine https://lnkd.in/eNKhDD6k ]

Can you have Founder Mode without skin in the game? As a startup cofounder, in a funding round I signed a contract guaranteeing my house and other possessions if the company was not successful. That was with small children and knowing my presence in the US was dependent on the company visa. That's skin in the game. The founder dynamic comes up in Peter Hyde's new profile of software engineering at Atlassian. Peter asks: "How important is the founder dynamic still in Atlassian, and do you feel it is valuable to retain it as you grow?" Mike Cannon-Brookes (cofounder of Atlassian) answers: "Most of my life has been spent building this company. I’m also one of the largest shareholders so my long-term interests are very much aligned with the long-term success of the company, employees and shareholders. In short, I’ve got a lot of skin in the game, and am really driven by a passion for Atlassian’s mission and vision." Can you have founder mode without an actual founder? Counter-examples include Satya Nadella at Microsoft - not a founder but acting like a founder. And, of course, one of Atlassian's co-founders has left (Scott Farquhar). And are there degrees of Founder Mode? https://lnkd.in/e_-f4WvE (Gartner sub req'd)

What are the real developer productivity benefits from Generative AI? To answer this question, Gartner brought together 40 engineering leaders from industries including banking, manufacturing, and healthcare and from a variety of organization sizes, ranging from under $50 million to over $100 billion in revenue. Highlights included: - Perhaps unsurprisingly, results are better for commonly-used languages and frameworks (Python, .NET) than lesser-used or older languages and frameworks (SAP ABAP, PHP). - Code assistants particularly help with onboarding, including providing “thoughtful answers” to new developers’ questions about the codebase, requirements and the business domain. - Code reuse is a concern. Engineering leaders flagged the risk of developers using code assistants to generate new code in scenarios where they could have used an existing library or framework. Read the full report here: https://lnkd.in/eMW3Cbhp (Gartner subscription required)

Maybe we were too hasty to move microservices out of the Trough of Disillusionment 😄 Valid points here: "Microservices are technical debt because they help you move faster for a time" - "Most people have a distributed monolith whether they know it or not". And with microservices "you have borrowed against someone else's productivity in the future" https://lnkd.in/eehiRD37

Kyle is an authority on #lowcode. It'll be super interesting to follow his reactions to Microsoft and Salesforce's announcements this week:

What is the most common type of technical debt? Akriti Kapoor shares our survey finding that *architecture* technical debt is the most common type of technical debt, here at #GartnerApps in London.