Insights into Dev Tooling with Tom Elliott

Jul 19, 2025

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I am in conversation with Tom Elliott, founder of Ocuroot and former Engineering Productivity lead at Yext,

Introduction:

Tom Elliott shares his career journey, starting from his early interest in computers to his current role in Dev tooling .

Career Insights:

Tom discusses the challenges of entering the industry during the financial crash and his transition from contract work to a full-time role at VMware .
He highlights his experience at VMware, working on early-stage projects like building login pages and authentication systems .

Shift to New York:

Tom talks about his move to New York and his work at a small VPN startup, focusing on user-facing applications .

Experience at Yext:

Tom shares his journey at Yext, starting as a mobile developer and gradually moving to backend development and Dev tooling .
He emphasizes the importance of being close to the users and getting immediate feedback on the tools he built .

Challenges and Solutions:

Tom discusses the challenges of working in large organizations, such as resolving merge conflicts and managing long-lived branches .
He explains the benefits of trunk-based development and feature flags for managing multiple features and environments .

Observability and Deployment:

Tom highlights the importance of observability and the use of tools like open telemetry for distributed tracing .
He shares insights on managing different deployment environments and ensuring consistency across regions .

Quality and CI/CD Pipelines:

Tom talks about the emphasis on quality and the importance of CI/CD pipelines in ensuring reliable software releases .
He shares his experience of setting up CI/CD pipelines to avoid issues like broken installers .

Conclusion:

Tom reflects on the importance of flexibility and prototyping in software development .
He shares his thoughts on the future of AI in coding and the role of human operators in leveraging AI tools .

Bio:

During nearly 20 years in the tech industry, Tom has worked for companies large and small on both sides of the pond and all layers of the tech stack from user-facing mobile and desktop applications to the backest of backends: DevOps. He is currently building Ocuroot, his own take on a CI/CD solution, based on his experiences scaling large numbers of environments for B2B SaaS products.

Links:

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/telliott1984/

* BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/telliott.me

* Blog: https://thefridaydeploy.substack.com/

* Ocuroot: https://www.ocuroot.com