S3 Ep9: Developer Productivity: the Inner Dev Loop & Quantitative Metrics

00:00.00
Kay James
All right hello and welcome to another episode of the livin' on the edge podcast I'm your host Kay James and today we're joined by guru Kamat co-founder of Neurelo how are you today?

00:10.98
Guru Kamat
A Hi Kay. Yeah glad thanks for having me on the podcast, I'm excited to be here.

00:15.64
Kay James
Yeah, why don't we start with a bit of a background of who you are and what you do.

00:23.78
Guru Kamat
Absolutely so um, yeah, I've been in tech for about 25 years now being in various engineering and engineering leadership roles being in a few different domains. I started with this domain called computer networking, where we were building products and platforms for. Layer 2 to 7 of what is known as a networking stack so things like switches and outers firewalls ad gateways load balancers and such and then after about 15 years of doing that moved over to computer security as a domain. Ah, did a couple of startups one was in the area of deception as a technique to gage bad guys otherwise and on zero trust and then spent a few years at Palo Alto Networks um building their cloud security division. Amazing experience. We had amazing traction. So. Kind of experienced scaling teams scaling the product. A fantastic experience like I said and then spent some time with stripe where again I was a part of the security engineering team building products to se stripees Stripe's customers stripe data and and and such. And now I'm I'm I'm building ureo um where we are a cloud data Api platform where we are making it easier and faster for developers to build deploy Iran and scale their applications.

01:46.57
Kay James
Nice So Neurelo focuses a bit on like database side of things. What inspired you to go from kind of that security background towards databases and tackling that issue.

01:58.84
Guru Kamat
Um, yeah I mean what is interesting is is throughout my career. Um, what I've noticed is as as developers kind of build deploy around and scale their applications. They have always have seen that they've always spent an inordinate amount of time on all things to do with databases. As they kind of do this did their work and um it is many different problems I mean like so let's say when the developers start to build an application they have to pick a database to use for their applications. The the first question is hey which database should we use. We know what application we want to build.

02:26.93
Kay James
Are.

02:36.93
Guru Kamat
You know the intent of the application but which is the right database for this once they pick the database they have to learn the nuances of the database the schema language of the database. The query language of the database they have to pick a particular framework or a library or a driver. For the application that they want to use to build with database once they have actually let's say they start prototyping with with the database if they find that the choice of database was was not ideal and they want to move to some other database. They're able to throw away all the work and then redo it all over again. Once they are built the application they have to take you to production which means they have to worry about things like monitoring and observability and how applications actually working in production once they deploy them data starts coming in queries start slowing down. You have time of day issues to deal with day of week issues to deal with. Noisy Neighbor problems generally to deal with so all all kinds of these problems developers have to kind of face when they build deploy and run and scale their applications and we kind of thought there obviously has to be a way to do better right? I mean. In the last so in the last few years. Everything has now become easier faster for developers to build and work with So why not work with databases or why not working with databases that's kind of what we set out to do to add Newrello We have kind of built a database abstraction platform which.

04:09.97
Guru Kamat
Takes away all these complexities of working with databases and kind of really makes it simple for them to program with databases and build their applications. It makes it easier for them to understand oh that applications are working with databases and then helps them accelerate optimize secure extend ah the use of databases. Um, with that application. So That's kind of what we have started to do. We really want to make it easier for developers and give them productive time back to work on better andmore high- value tasks than all the boilerplate stuff and all the grunt work. Um, and all the unpredictability that comes. Ah, with working with databases.

04:48.66
Kay James
So what are some of the more specific pain points like what specifically does norelo do to you know tackle some of those challenges with dealing with databases.

04:59.74
Guru Kamat
Yeah, so the very first thing is going back to how developers program their applications and web databases. So um, typically they will choose a framework right? They will choose like an Orm or. Sometimes they do just use database drivers directlyly and these come with a lot of complexities. They have to kind of wire them up. They have to set them up. There's a lot of learning curves that are involved for specific languages specific or im specific databases. So what we want to do is simplify that entire journey and to that end. Um, we want to leverage this concept of Apis which are very common I mean you see for example, what stripe has done with payments and payments is a very complicated space for applications to accept payments from ah their inside them. It is very. Complex there' is a lot of kind of sausage making that goes into accepting payments but stripe apis make it really simple and all you do is call those apis and it handles all the all the heavy lifting around accepting babypi api accepting payments I'm sorry dwio um did the same thing for communications. It's very easy to now. Um. Introduce messaging and communications and other stuff into into your applications with tell your apis and we want to bring the same notion to working with databases right? We have this notion which we've introduced which you got cloud data apis where we automatically generate purpose built apis for the data models and the schemas.

06:30.26
Guru Kamat
In the databases. Um, that developers want for their application so they get these purpose build apis standard apis and these are in the rest format or or in the graphql format today. Ah, we plan to introduce more later but these are the ones that we've started with so independent of the programming language you're using you could be using python. Golang java javascript doesn't matter. These are standard apis you can just start using and we kind of abstract away the databases as well. So all the complexities of whether you're using a postgres database or a mysql database or a nosql database like Mongo all those are abstract in a way. You don't have to worry about thisql language complexities or learning the mongo query language just work with Apis you know your intent just call the apis get the responses in a standard format and worry less about like how to work with the databases and just build our application that's kind of what we have started with.

07:25.76
Kay James
A.

07:27.59
Guru Kamat
It is enabling simplification of how applications can be built and then the next steps are helping giving them observability telemetry helping them understand how applications working with databases queries slowing down giving them that visibility helping them accelerate optimize things like that.

07:46.30
Kay James
Um, yeah, so um, how has database programming changed in the past twenty or so years that you've been around.

07:54.29
Guru Kamat
Yeah, interestingly it does not a whole lot right? I mean when I graduated out of school like 25 years back the way kind of the focus was more on like the theory of how databases work especially in relational databases all like theoretical stuff like. Very very important stuff but typical stuff like cap theorems and asset. Um compliance stuff. Um, and there was some sql programming thought but but the the real world and the way that people build with applications is very different and I think once. Engineers kind of start building applications. They realize that it's a lot more complex. Um, there's a lot of different things that they have to think through worry about that is programming language-s specific nuances there is database- specificific nuances and that really has not changed when I speak to. People graduating out of college today it it seems like it's pretty much what was being taught as theory but not a lot of the practicalist aspects that go into programming with with databases and to be honest data today is like the key. Most applications and user experiences. How data is stored how data is structured. How data is retrieved it really influences user experiences. Um for the applications and do that to that effect arguably the choice of the database and how you work with the database.

09:24.25
Guru Kamat
Is one of the most critical decisions that developers have to make when building an application and we really wanted to like make it easier for them. I mean today developers have to do all the heavy lifting around choosing um a database choosing the framework and we live with newrelo be like hey this is an abstraction platform. The concept of Api is the concept of abstractions. Generally well-und understood I think you have plenty of you had quite a lot of podcast where um, people have emphasized like how powerful Apis are and how powerful abstractions generally are and how they make it easier for developers to kind of. Build and extend um their code and we kind of want to leverage that concept and bring that to the world of databases and database programming as well.

10:12.76
Kay James
Yeah, so how? um do how would you describe right? introducing nerello to like the development process. What would that really look like for a developer who's picking it up today. How would that improve their productivity in their life.

10:25.11
Guru Kamat
Yeah, yeah, so absolutely I think so our our goal like I said is really to make it easier faster better for developers to program against databases and to really give them time back to higher value tasks than they would otherwise do building all the boilerplate stuff. That they have to do around databases so today there are two ways. Developers can start with us. Let's say they already have a database they already have some schema some data models that they already have built with a database. So just as a matter of connecting the database to Nella and what we do is we will introspect. The schema and what developers have done and instantly give them these rest and graphql apis that are purpose built for the schema that they already have in the database and by the way these Apis are like version control. They come with a rich set of documentation around inputs outputs. Um, errors what have you so they can just like use these apis from within their code and most applications today already use a bunch of different apis they could be using authentication apis etc. So it's like simply extending what they use. Ah what they do with Apis in general with. Programming with databases as well through nerelo so that is one way where you exist where you have existing databases and existing schemas and data models within those databases but 1 of the more common use cases with us today is also that let's say want to build a brand new application right? A greenfield application.

11:56.48
Guru Kamat
Then you can actually start with Us. You can actually start building your schema with us. So We have a bunch of ways in which we actually help you build the Schemas We actually do normalize Schemas by the way so you don't have to worry about the database andances. We worry about how to translate them into the database specifics. But if we give you a normalized. Representation of a data model or a schema which is basically the structure of the data you intend to store and retrieve from a database so you can actually build those schemas directly inside of New Rela and then as you do that Again. We will help you with migrations applying those schemas to the database. We will again give you the apis that you're going to use from your code and again no learning curve involved. You don't have to worry about a particular Ro or M or a particular language framework that you have to deal with these are standard Apis that developers are already familiar with how to use and they can just start storing and retrieving the data. Ah, from the database using urelo.

12:55.34
Kay James
Um, what other productivity tips Do you have or any best practices advice like um, do you think that best our productivity developer productivity productivity should be a focus of like from the beginning when you're you know, building your your team and your. Your product or whatever from the get or is it something that comes along later.

13:18.82
Guru Kamat
Yeah, developer productivity in general is a subject I'm very passionate about um and yeah I mean like you know, um, happy and highly productive Developers are the key to success for any organization and all of us engineering leaders kind of have a responsibility to build. And environment where people can work at th best um and are excited about their work. Um, and and interestingly enough I mean developer Good developer productivity. Not only leads to like good product outcomes but also helps you build an engineering culture and a brand. Which kind of becomes a talent magnet for more and more strong developers to come and join your team. So Lots of benefits um to to to just having good Product. You develop a productivity as as a goal um for any organization that that us leaders are in. Um, what does developer productivity mean and I mean development generally is a highly collaborative. Highly complex kind of creative kind of work and developer productivity is all about how do you increase efficiencies ah for your development team. How do you. Reduce friction. How do you reduce paper cuts. How do you reduce low value work and let kind of developers focus on a more intellectually stimulating work. How do you reduce interruptions that they have how do you kind of give them more predictability around their day.

14:50.60
Guru Kamat
And let them get into what is called Flow Flow State which is this zone where developers are highly focused and kind of do their best work So developer productivity I think is is is very critical. Um that are depending on the phase of the company.

15:04.39
Kay James
So the.

15:09.80
Guru Kamat
Is different emphasis right? when the company is very young and very early. The focus usually is on proving the proving themselves right? The company has to establish themselves build a product build find find product market for it. Find the right customer Base. So The emphasis generally is on. Let's get things done as quickly as we can and there is less of an emphasis on like measurement to be honest in early stage companies. But as as team scale as product scale I think more and more.

15:31.50
Kay James
And.

15:45.18
Guru Kamat
Friction starts showing up and more and more kind of the transactional costs of doing work for teams start increasing as ah teams and as products start scaling. So I think developer productivity and measurements and a focus on that. Becomes more and more important as it's It's always Important. Don't get me wrong, but it's more and more important as the company starts starts scaling really.

16:11.93
Kay James
So from your perspective. What are some trends that you see emerging in the field of developer productivity productivity and how is newrelo like staying in line with those trends or trying to get ahead of it.

16:26.43
Guru Kamat
Yeah, so if you look at if you talk about trends in the industry. There are a couple of frameworks that are pretty popular pretty popular for measuring developer productivity. Um, one is this ah framework called Dora it kind of started from Google. Um. But it hit me around. But I think it was kind of championed and evangelized by Google off late. It. It started with the devops realm tourra stands for devops research and assessment and the main focus there is around like primarily velocity and quality of what the teams are building so things like. They they have that things like change lead time which is um, how long does it take for when from when a developer starts working on something to when it is released to the to the users um to like deployment frequency. How often. To teams release things into production for the users. Um, and then there is like quality metrics a around a um of all the changes that were released how many did we have to roll back. It's called like change failure rates or how often does it do systems go down and how. Ah, long. Does it take for us to recover from failures. So it kind of focuses on like ah the quantitative metrics are around velocity and point quality for our productivity. Ah, but like we all know I mean those are probably not the only metrics to consider.

17:55.79
Guru Kamat
I think it it kind of misses on the human and the emotional and the kind of some of the other qualitative metrics around productivity so that is another framework which has been getting traction off late. It's called a space framework where s stands for satisfaction and well-being. Ah, how happy and excited and engaged are really the developers who are working on your products ah piece stands for performance a stands for activity. It's kind of similar to the Dora metrics around velocity and quality and then you have communication and collaboration and efficiency and flow.

18:33.55
Kay James
Again.

18:34.49
Guru Kamat
So What do you want? sick. Yeah, so these these kind of Frameworks really help kind of build the right metrics that a team need to have around measuring and around kind of improving their productivity. But I think it all starts with. Kind of having a good Baseline understanding where the teams stand understanding where the pain points are and I've generally found that the best kind of leaders and the best teams. Um, they kind of have a good relationship between them I mean the teams understand that the leadership wants. Is well intentiontioned behind this effort and really has the best intentions of developers in mind. Um, so so they really engage with the teams. They kind of talk to them. Ah 1 on ones really important with not just your direct team members but also Like. Skip levels but basically getting a good understanding of what developers feel about what the challenges are where the inefficcincies are where the friction is um where are they spending a lot of their productive time and unproductive time what is working well for Them. What is not working forward. Well for them and generally when.

19:53.58
Guru Kamat
When these conversations happen certain trends emerge right? So you'll find out that hey most developers are saying that a build times are too long or they're waiting for code reviews to happen and they take a very long time to happen or there are too many meetings on that calendar. Or there are too many interruptions that happen because of production outages. What have you? there's like these trends emerge and then over time. Ah, you can actually build processes and tooling to really measure and then make incremental progress and and gains. Towards reducing some of these inefficiencies and friction. Um, one of the biggest things is developers really? don't want to do like boilerplate stuff. Low value work and they would rather focus on like high value work which really kind of help helps them build their applications. And Nerelo kind of really is focused on that like I mentioned earlier working with databases is kind of one of the biggest things that kind of um developers have to do when building their applications. So the during the initial part at all the kind of the. Things I keep mentioning among frameworkworks and database noances and complexities. Um, if you can reduce that and that is kind of low value work if you can really not have them focus on the database and how to work with databases and get them to really.

21:28.87
Guru Kamat
Program and build their applications is I think a big win for developers and that's kind of what neural is focusing on and the other thing is during their journey of building scaling and running applications most of the interruptions that come their way the unpredictably that comes. In their in their jobs is again around databases right? query slowing down customers. Not happy. Something has gone wrong. We have some regression around migrations. Whatever I think all these can be addressed by what we are trying to do at Nerelo and again taking away these complexities and giving them productive time back. Is really our focus.

22:10.47
Kay James
So I Really like the kind of focus on the human aspect of it. Um, you know, using how developers actually feel um as um, a metric for success I Guess um, what other. Key Metrics. Do you think are there to ensure like you know as you scale your team that you guys are successful.

22:32.54
Guru Kamat
Yeah, absolutely I think like you said I mean there is a very high correlation between developer satisfaction and happiness with with the product outcomes and how productive and happy and engaged. Um, they are um.

22:46.95
Guru Kamat
If you look at the work that developers do right? Generally it's categorized into 2 buckets I mean they're commonly known as the inner loop of work and the outer loop of work. So The inner loop of work is the work that they actually do towards building the product. So It's things like coding building. Testing like that's like what they consider productive and it's very engaging and intellectually stimulating and that's kind of one set of work that developers commonly do and then there is the other center of work caught the outer loop of work which is um. The work that they have to do to actually take things into production. Ah so things like integrating what they have done into the product. Ah but releasing it deploying it monitoring How things are going in production all the meetings that they have to actually do towards this. All the institution and transactional costs that they have to pay towards but taking the work that they have done and getting that deployed and in production and running for the users and there's a bunch of different metrics around all of these that can be can be Leveraged. So if we look At. Coding which is the the inner loop activity that most developers enjoy doing again going back to like how discoverable the discoverability of the code like how fragile is the code. How easily can they find different libraries and abstractions.

24:18.75
Guru Kamat
How much boiler plate stuff. Do they have to do who versus just leveraging what already exists and building on top of that. Um almost time do builds take and how quickly can they build what they've done and test it out. Um, how many unit tests do they have. Like what is the confidence level. They can build as they actually write code so there's a bunch of different metrics that can be kind of built around this and the goal of any organization is really to to increase the time the developers spend in this so-called inner loop and reduce the time. That is depend on the outer loop I think the general metric is some of the top companies try to have this be a seventy thirty seventy five Twenty five eighty Twenty kind of a ratio where seventy twenty percent of the time is spent on the inner loop and 20 to 30% of the time is spent on the outer loop. The closer you can get toward that the better again. It all starts like I said earlier with kind of having conversations with developers understanding the pain points. Um and then building like holistic approach to measuring developer productivity around these quantitative metrics around velocity quality as well as. Qualitative and the human and emotional metrics that we talked about earlier.

25:42.40
Kay James
And you know after hearing you know a bit of your story. It's clear that you've kind of had that whole spectrum being developer being like a leader management type of role Now. You're co-founding a whole company. So what? Um. What are some of the this is a kind of a broad general type of Question. What are some of the most important lessons that you've learned through all of that. Um, and what advice would you give to you know a normal developer type person like me.

26:10.30
Guru Kamat
Yeah, so I mean I've been very blessed to have worked across a lot of different companies small and large have they have had the opportunities to build products that have got an amazing traction scale teams built scale products and I think. The importance of a strong foundation is is 1 thing that keeps coming back into focus if you want to scale a product. It is important that it has good solid foundations if the foundations are not ideal then every time we try to scale. It's like um, 1 step forward 2 times. Ah, 2 steps backward. So the importance of a strong foundation is something that um I've learned over time. The other is the focus on um, developer experience. Not just like or let's say user experience to begin with the products you would. Build have to really delight your customer. They really have to enjoy using the products it has to be simple, straightforward and kind of pretty kind of self-explanatory and on how they should be how they should be used and how they can use them. And then internet developer experience really matters as well. I mean if your teams and happy and productive and engaged. Um I think they'll do wonders um and then reliability of platforms is another thing that I've learned ready up any platform that you build platforms like stripe Palo Alta networks

27:45.54
Guru Kamat
They have to be highly available. Highly Reliable. So that people using those platforms have the confidence to kind of um, build an applications and deploy them for their work. So That's kind of something that I've really learned from a broad point of View. And again people people are the most important asset that any company has so understanding them Lingo relationships with them making sure that you have their back ah lead with empathy and competence I think for leaders is really really important for Developers. I Mean like the world is their oyster I mean developers are the key to kind of any successful company and I think they should take every opportunity to learn. Um, kind of be always kind of challenging themselves to do better to learn more kind of be at the. Always operating at the edge of their current capabilities and always trying to learn more and and challenge themselves to learn new Domains New Technologies find better ways of doing things. Um is is kind of something that really helps developers especially in the early stage. And then as kind of they progress through their career I think giving it back right to help other developers. Um, kind of come up to speed ah help them become better sharing your knowledge ah kind of becomes important as well.

29:19.50
Kay James
Awesome! So before we wrap up um, is there anything that you'd like to shout out promote to our audience.

29:27.23
Guru Kamat
So I mean I would like to again. Ah do a shout out to what we are building at Newrelo I think we have built an amazing platform have we encourage developers to give us a try. Um, we believe that'll really make your life easier when you build applications. Um. We have a free product. It's always freeze. We can just sign up and give it a try. Ah you can find us at Neurelo.com um, and reallyly we we love your feedback. We just get started. We know that it's a very complex space and there's a lot more that we have to and we will be in the coming months and years. But we love your feedback. And what we have built so far. Um, and we are always there to kind of listen and help.

30:07.52
Kay James
Awesome And how can people where can people reach you where can they find out more.

30:11.94
Guru Kamat
Yeah, so I think go to Neurelocom I think you can sign up for a product there. We have our Discord server there as well. So you can always reaches out on a Discord server if you have questions if you need help you can always email us at hello@neurdeella.com as well and like I said I mean. Just tries out gives your feedback and let us know if you like what we have built.

30:36.20
Kay James
Awesome! Thank you Guru for chatting with us and thank you to our listeners for tuning in today that wraps up another episode of the living on the edge podcast. Thank you.

30:46.35
Guru Kamat
Thank you Kay, bye.