Engineering Enablement by DX

Will Larson, the CTO at Calm, covers a wide range of topics including whether Infrastructure Engineering is chronically understaffed, the role of Eng Ops, how his opinion on the “build vs buy” question has changed, his thoughts on metrics, and more. 

Helpful resources:

• Will's Infraeng book
• Will's article, Infrastructure planning
• Will's article, How to invest in infrastructure

Joining us for this episode is Victoria Morgan-Smith, the Director of Delivery for Engineering Enablement at the Financial Times. Victoria shares some of the tradeoffs in having an autonomous, “you build it, you run it” culture. She also shares how her group equips engineering teams with metrics, best practices, and more.

Follow Victoria on LinkedIn

In this episode Abi talks with Peter Seibel. Peter previously was the Director of Engineering for the Democratic National Committee, and before that led Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness (EE) team. In this interview, Peter reflects on his experience at Twitter, sharing why it’s better to invest in EE early and his vision for how EE teams can fulfill their potential.  

Useful links:

• Follow Peter on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Read Peter's post about leading Engineering Effectiveness at Twitter: Let a 1,000 Flowers Bloom. Then Rip 999 of Them Out by the Roots 

In this episode, Varun Achar (Director of Engineering at Razorpay) explains how the Platform org has grown from a 15-person team owning everything, to 3 separate subteams. He also shares how they think about creating a culture of productivity, and some of the tactics they’ve used for increasing service adoption.

Helpful links: 

• Connect with Varun on LinkedIn
• Read Varun's blog post, The Platform Engineer

In this episode, Marco Chirico shares the strategies DoorDash’s Developer Productivity group uses to prioritize their work. He also explains how the Developer Productivity group has evolved over time, and how they measure their success today.  

Useful links: 

• Connect with Marco on LinkedIn
• Read DoorDash's Engineering blog

Liz Saling, Director of Engineering at GitHub, shares the story of how the Developer Experience group was founded and why GitHub paused features for a quarter to focus on making developer experience improvements.

Helpful links:

• Watch Liz’s GitHub Universe talk, “Paying Down Technical Debt”
• Find Liz on LinkedIn or Twitter
• Read Liz’s blog at lizsaling.com
• Read GitHub’s engineering blog