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Developer productivity with Dr. Nicole Forsgren (creator of DORA, co-creator of SPACE)

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Feb 19, 2025

Guest

Nicole Forsgren

In this engaging discussion, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, a leading expert in developer productivity and co-creator of the DORA and SPACE frameworks, dives into the complexities of measuring productivity in software development. She explores the importance of holistic metrics that prioritize developer well-being and communication. Nicole shares insightful strategies for improving team dynamics, the impact of AI tools on workflows, and the value of investment in platform teams to boost productivity. It's a treasure trove of knowledge for tech leaders and engineers alike!

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ADVICE

Adapting DORA

Adapt DORA to your environment, not the other way around.
Examples like air-gapped systems and mobile app releases demonstrate this.

insights

INSIGHT

DORA's Scope

DORA only covers commit-to-production, not the complete developer experience.
Holistic developer experience considers other crucial aspects like environment setup, local builds, etc.

question_answer

ANECDOTE

Uber's Compliance Impact

At Uber, increased compliance measures negatively impacted developer experience.
Needing approvals for data access caused delays and context switching.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Understanding Productivity Metrics in Software Development

02:44 • 3min

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Understanding Developer Productivity Through a Holistic Lens

05:20 • 3min

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Measuring Developer Productivity: Insights and Challenges

08:10 • 22min

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Developer Experiences: Big vs. Small

30:38 • 7min

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Advocating for Developer Productivity Investments

37:44 • 6min

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Enhancing Software Team Efficiency

43:22 • 20min

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AI Transformation in Software Engineering

01:03:17 • 12min

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From Code to Research: A Journey of Discovery

01:15:20 • 7min

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How do you architect a live streaming system to deal with more load than it’s ever been done before? Today, we hear from an architect of such a system: Ashutosh Agrawal, formerly Chief Architect of JioCinema (and currently Staff Software Engineer at Google DeepMind.)

We take a deep dive into video streaming architecture, tackling the complexities of live streaming at scale (at tens of millions of parallel streams) and the challenges engineers face in delivering seamless experiences. We talk about the following topics:

• How large-scale live streaming architectures are designed

• Tradeoffs in optimizing performance

• Early warning signs of streaming failures and how to detect them

• Why capacity planning for streaming is SO difficult

• The technical hurdles of streaming in APAC regions

• Why Ashutosh hates APMs (Application Performance Management systems)

• Ashutosh’s advice for those looking to improve their systems design expertise

• And much more!

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:28) The world record-breaking live stream and how support works with live events

(05:57) An overview of streaming architecture

(21:48) The differences between internet streaming and traditional television.l

(22:26) How adaptive bitrate streaming works

(25:30) How throttling works on the mobile tower side

(27:46) Leading indicators of streaming problems and the data visualization needed

(31:03) How metrics are set

(33:38) Best practices for capacity planning

(35:50) Which resources are planned for in capacity planning

(37:10) How streaming services plan for future live events with vendors

(41:01) APAC specific challenges

(44:48) Horizontal scaling vs. vertical scaling

(46:10) Why auto-scaling doesn’t work

(47:30) Concurrency: the golden metric to scale against

(48:17) User journeys that cause problems

(49:59) Recommendations for learning more about video streaming

(51:11) How Ashutosh learned on the job

(55:21) Advice for engineers who would like to get better at systems

(1:00:10) Rapid fire round

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• Software architect archetypes https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/software-architect-archetypes

• Engineering leadership skill set overlaps https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-leadership-skillset-overlaps

• Software architecture with Grady Booch https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/software-architecture-with-grady-booch

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See the transcript and other references from the episode at ⁠⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast⁠⁠

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