Fresh from working on developer platforms at Uber, Serdar Badem tells us his experience working on improving developer productivity. He's working at Tanzu now and so he also discusses the work we're doing to help improve developer productivity.

The phrase "value stream" is used so often in software development that it's easy to forget exactly what it means. "Waste" is another word like that. In this episode, Coté talks with Steve Pereira about value stream mappings, what waste is, exactly, and why it's so difficult to do what seems like an obviously good idea, like value stream mapping.

- Steve in LinkedIn.
- Steve's book.
- Flow community.
- Awesome waste/countermeasure handout, including definitions of waste.

In this episode Coté talks with Laura Tacho, the CTO of DX on several topics, starting with tech debt. Laura shares her viewpoint on how the concept and use of 'tech debt' changes based on perspective, and the need for better quantification of these concepts for businesses. They also discuss developer productivity metrics and three types of meetings.

Read all of Laura's great articles here.

You always hear that making a series of small changes is better than BIG BANG change. How does this really play out though? Doesn't that seem a little...naive when it comes to large organizations doing the BIG and MISSION CRITICAL work? 

In this episode, Coté talks with Betty Junod on this topic. She draws from many sources like her first hand experience as an executive and working with the DevOps and cloud native community. They also discuss making culture changes in organizations and how recent work to figure out how to determine "business value."

Watch the video of this recording if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

- Betty in LinkedIn.
- Betty in Twitter.
- The Developer Platform paper.
- The Role of a Platform paper.
- No Developer Left behind paper.

Ben educates Coté on what Backstage is. Coté is always thinking that new tech does more than it actually does, and he eagerly de-scopes his inflated expectations with Ben's wiseness. This is the most detailed explanation of the core of Backstage you're likely to see, and the two only about third of the Backstage ecosystem overall.

See Ben at BackStageCon, Nov 6th, 2023 in Chicago.

The three of us are back to discuss what a service mesh is and why it exists as a stand-alone thing. The result we come to is that you want this kind of network control and management as its own layer, not something that’s built into the stack.

Check out the video if you prefer that.

Come see us at:

• VMware Explore EU, Nov, 2023.
• SpringOne Tour Amsterdam, Oct 9th, 2023.
• SpringOne Tour London, Oct 12th.

Links:

• Gartner’s overview: Market Guide for Service Mesh.
• GigaOm’s Service mesh radar.

What does a car manufacture need to do to speed up their software delivery cycle? Manufacturing is often finely tuned following lean and other principles, but the software development and delivery process, oddly, is not. In this episode, we talk about he last five years of software transformation at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).

We discuss the type of software JLR creates for itself, the need to change to transform (driven by quality and speed of delivery), putting CI/CD in place, challenges to change management (mostly about people), and the mismatch between finance and software.

Check out Mike in LinkedIn.

Also, you can watch the video of this episode here, if you like that kind of thing.

Coté talks with Bryan Ross about fitting Kubernetes (and it's use) into the business strategy.

Check out Bryan's YouTube channel for more Bryan.

"75% of IT and business executives say that their companies’ ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly" reads a recent Forrester Consulting report. If that’s the case, why are so many developer in large organizations have a bad developer experience? Paul Kelly wrote up the case for good DevEx and what it looks like for developers on the VMware Tanzu blog recently. In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with him about the blog. Paul also wrote two books on Visual COBOL so, naturally, we open up by talking about COBOL. Why did we ever need more?

You can watch the original, streamed video if you like that kind of thing.

Links:

• A Developer Perspective on Developer Experience, the blog in question.
• Paul on CI/CD.
• More article from Paul.
• Paul’s books: Visual COBOL: A Developer's Guide to Modern COBOL and Visual COBOL: New Application Modernization Tools for the Java Developer.
• Paul in LinkedIn.

In this episode, Coté talks with Corey Dinkens about Tanzu Mission Control. The most recent version can now run on-premises, meaning those who can't run it as a public SaaS now can run Tanzu Mission Control where ever they like, on or off the Internet. We also discuss Tanzu Mission Control in general and some other new features.

Learn more about Tanzu Mission Control:

- More about the new release here.
- Corey's quick demo of Tanzu Mission Control.
- More about all of Tanzu Mission Control here.

So you've built an app platform. And those pesky developers aren’t showing up to use. Or, worse, they grumble about it! Did you remember to tell anyone about it, to convince them to use it? You know: marketing! Also, they'll need to know how to use it. And you know what that means! Documentation. 

In this episode, Coté and Ben talk about the basics platform marketing: brand, principles, advocacy, internal conferences, and more. They also discuss the role of Backstage in making platforms better, as well as everyday developer life.

You can also watch the video of this episode, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Be sure to check out VMware’s platforms:

• For the Kubernetes fans out there: Tanzu Application Platform.
• And for the PaaS fans: The Tanzu Application Service (based on Cloud Foundry).