DevOps for Java Developers (or maybe against them?!) by Baruch Sadogursky

Build speed and feedback loops are critical for developer productivity - builds should ideally take under 3 minutes to maintain flow and avoid context switching

DevOps is about enabling faster, higher quality software delivery through collaboration, automation and observability - not just tools and processes

Key strategies for improving build speed:

• Local caching
• Remote caching with distributed caches
• Parallel builds utilizing all CPU cores
• Incremental builds that only rebuild changed modules
• Predictive test selection using ML to run relevant tests

Production observability and testing in production are becoming more important as staging environments become less feasible with scale and complexity

Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) focuses on:

• Eliminating toil and bottlenecks
• Fostering faster feedback loops
• Automation and tooling improvements
• Measuring and improving productivity

Build quality and speed investments should be prioritized:

• Get high-end development hardware
• Implement build caching and optimization
• Use build scanning and analytics
• Track and optimize build metrics

Testing and quality assurance need to shift left while maintaining production validation:

• Fast local test feedback
• Progressive delivery with feature flags
• Controlled rollouts
• Production monitoring and observability

Focus on outcomes over output - measure impact and value delivered rather than just velocity and throughput

DevOps culture requires true collaboration between dev, ops, QA and product teams - not just throwing code “over the wall”

Developer productivity directly impacts business outcomes through faster delivery, higher quality and improved developer experience