Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda 10 years of driving developer productivity at Yelp | Kent Wills (Yelp)
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Mar 26, 2024 Kent Wills, Director of Engineering at Yelp, discusses the evolution of developer productivity efforts. Topics include forming the team, managing code ownership in a monolith, building a design system, standardization, LLM implementation, and demonstrating the value of their work.
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Initial Inspiration
- Kent Wills's team at Yelp was initially inspired by a Twitter blog post advocating for letting diverse engineering practices flourish initially.
- This "let 1,000 flowers bloom" approach, focusing on scaling efficiently, influenced Yelp's early engineering effectiveness strategy.
Getting Leadership Buy-in
- Frame developer productivity improvements in terms of how they help other leaders achieve their goals.
- Connect the problem to the leader's success, like showing how it impacts production deployments.
Monolith Ownership Challenges
- Yelp initially relied on Git blame for code ownership, but this proved unsustainable with employee turnover.
- They transitioned to a team-based ownership approach using metadata and eventually microservices.