What Can You Expect from a Developer Conference These Days?
What can you expect from a developer conference these days? Two topics in particular: the developer experience and AI.
Developers spend much of their time not coding, said Ivan Burazin, Chief Development Experience Officer at InfoBip, in a recent discussion on The New Stack Makers before the Shift Conference in Zadar, Croatia. Burazin started the conference and sold it to Infobip, a cloud communications company.
When thinking about the developer experience, Burazin cited how developers waste about 50 to 70% of their productive time not coding, Burazin said. Productive time means after vacation time, meetings, and other matters get subtracted.
But the time keeps getting lost when considering how that core time gets eaten away by non-coding work. A developer has to wait to spin up an environment. Tests take away from a developer’s core time, as do builds. Start to add up the hours, and the time starts to melt away. Setting up a developer time takes 2.7 hours a week. For tests, it’s over three hours a week. And for builds, it’s almost four hours a week.
The developer experience becomes a root matter, which divides into an internal and external realm. In an external capacity, the developer’s customer experience becomes what matters. Internally, it becomes a matter of velocity, meaning the amount of code a developer deploys.
“But at the same time, the experience developers has to be better or more enjoyable because in a sense, they will actually be able to produce more faster,” Burazin said.
This all comes back to the overall developer experience, something Buazin pays attention to with Shift, coming up Sept. 18-19.
At Shift, the conference has talks on six stages, Burazin said. One stage will focus on the developer experience from an internal and external perspective.
The developer experience topic is new, but even newer is AI, which will also be the focus at another stage at Shift.
But what should be covered in a discussion about AI if there are few real experts to move the conversation forward?
Burazin said it’s more about how people can use AI to build a product, service, or company. Every company will become an AI company in the future.
“How can you build something utilizing AI and that’s how we look at setting up themes on that stage,” Burazin said.
