DevEx Connect

Last week, Ethan Sumner announced the launch of DevEx Connect:

DevEx Connect is a community-driven, independent research, analysis, and events organisation operating within the DevEx umbrella, which includes DevOps, SRE, Developer Experience, Platform Engineering, Cloud, and AI.

Over the next 12 months, we plan to host a global DevEx Connect summit series in London, Manchester, Sydney, and San Francisco. These events will focus on key themes within the DevEx umbrella. Additionally, we will launch an industry-focused roadshow with a cloud perspective, featuring Azure and AWS across the UK in London, Leeds, Edinburgh, Belfast, and Cardiff.

I think Ethan has a terrific vision, so I'm very excited and proud to partner with him to bring it to life and support his vision. In this post, I want to share why Developer Experience matters to me, and why I think DevEx Connect is going to be so impactful.

Why Developer Experience Matters

As Marc Andreessen said, “Software is eating the world,” and organizations of all sizes in all industries rely on software teams. Yet building a big software team alone is not enough. Software teams build software — what use is a software team if it isn’t productive or effective? 

Thus, organizations are on a never-ending quest not just to recruit people but also to retain them, unblock them, and create environments, systems, processes, and team culture that enable them to be effective. Whether explicit or not, every organization has some level of effort to improve their software teams' effectiveness. It has been this way since the very beginning of computer science - we create new programming languages or new practices like continuous integration - in our quest for productivity and effectiveness. 

This quest has more recently been given a name: Developer Experience, or DevEx for short. It is an umbrella term that refers to the systems, technology, processes, and culture that influence the effectiveness of software teams. I love the focus on experience because while productivity is quantifiable, measuring and chasing it often hurts more than helps. The DevEx framing allows room to focus on the more qualitative aspects of software team members' lived experiences. In my experience, empowered teams with clear missions and managers who unblock obstacles are the best ways to impact productivity. 

DevEx is also here to stay. Twenty years from now, will the productivity and effectiveness of software teams be more or less important? It seems obvious to me that DevEx - even if it’s called something else then - will matter even more. In this way, we are betting on a macro trend that has been true for the last 50 years of computer science and will continue to become more important in the future. 

But predicting the future is hard. Our industry sometimes feels like the fashion industry. SOA and Microservices, for example, experienced sudden rises in popularity, followed by equally dramatic falls many years later. Gartner calls this the “trough of disillusionment.”

Today, a big fashion in DevEx is Platform Engineering, specifically the building out of Internal Developer Portals and Internal Developer Platforms. Every large organization has initiatives around it, and there are conference circuits focussed on it, though I suspect in the long run, it won’t have staying power. Who really wants to turn up on their first day of work at Megacorp and be told “we built our own internal developer platform you get to use”. No, thank you! But other people much smarter than me think otherwise. More importantly, it's these conversations and the constant evolution of our industry that drive us forward. Our industry advances when real practitioners (not vendors or analysts) are able to get together and share stories of what actually worked and what they learned along the way.

These experiences are shared in many ways, but the in-person gathering of practitioners is, I believe, the most critical. The more frequently these experiences are shared, the quicker our whole industry advances. Human connection, the spirit of community and a sense of belonging, and curating moments of free thinking and uncensored conversation ultimately lead to better outcomes for all.

Why DevEx Connect

It’s with these observations in mind that DevEx Connect was born. Our goal is to advance the conversations around developer experience by creating space for practitioners to gather and share what really works and to contribute to that conversation ourselves. I hope that when we are successful, we will help to improve the developer experience and, thus, the effectiveness of software teams at organizations all over the world. 

Something I really love about Ethan's approach is that we are starting with a deep investment into existing local user groups and meetups. These are often run by volunteers, who often struggle to find sponsors and particularly venues, and can suffer from lack of volunteer time. However, they are critical forums in which developer experience topics are discussed. DevEx Connect’s “Operation Uplift” will invest $200K, and more importantly, many hours of work, into supporting and bolstering these groups. This will help to accelerate thousands of conversations at the local level. 

In conjunction with our launch, we are excited to announce #OperationUplift, our comprehensive plan to revitalise and uplift communities within the UK. This initiative includes direct funding, support programs, marketing efforts, venue partnerships, a national speaker database, and a training program. We also offer free consultancy to organisations keen to support their local communities. Initially, we will provide £100k in funding to DevOps, SRE, Platform, and DevEx communities and an additional £50k each for Azure and AWS communities. Community support has always been a core passion, and I am eager to see the impact we can make.

We then hope to take these conversations to the next level and bring them together into larger conferences to provide a world-class conference and event experience. Our goal is to be the #1 event of the year for:

• DevOps Engineers,
• SRE's,
• Platform Engineers,
• and the people who manage and work with them.

With the goal of bringing them all together in one place to share stories and experiences of what really works and what they learned along the way.

We're starting small, but we hope these conferences will grow over time (both in number and size). It’s not about being the biggest conference but the most impactful. Our measure of success will be the impact that comes out of the conversations we host rather than simply how many people attend. We would rather have a small event that generates meaningful leaps forward in the DevEx conversation than large events that regurgitate many of the same talks by the same people you can hear elsewhere. 

DevEx Connect is Independent

Launching something like this is expensive (good venues require large up-front commitments), but I believe in Ethan's vision and have agreed to provide the funding to get it started.

Octopus has put me in a very fortunate position to fund something like this personally, independent of Octopus. I’ve decided to fund this personally, rather than through Octopus, because I think it’s very important that it is independent in order to bring many different voices together. I’m hopeful Octopus will exhibit at our events, but I’m also hopeful to see many Octopus competitors too. A rising tide lifts all boats.

I started my career as a developer and created the first version of Octopus during my spare time because traditional CD pipelines negatively affected my developer experience. I care a lot about developer experience, and I suppose Octopus was my first project aimed at influencing it. But along the way I’ve watched practices come and go and ideas rise and fall, and watched and participated in the conversations that have shaped it, and realised the value of ideas and culture over tools. I hope supporting Ethan with DevEx Connect allows me to contribute in a small way to something even bigger in developer experience.