DevX enthusiast, Engineering Manager @ Spotify Backend Foundation

Are tests a chore, or do they help us move faster? Let’s examine what makes testing great and not so great. We’ll focus on test strategies that help us code with confidence and clarity, and where they can cost us time and energy. The secret to good testing lies in how it shapes our developer experience. Do our tests give us useful feedback in a timely manner? How quickly can we tell what is wrong when a test suite fails? Do they document our features and explain our past decisions? We’ll answer these questions with better tests that give us joy.

Have you ever noticed how much time you spend troubleshooting your local development environment before you can actually begin writing code? Software engineers spend a large amount of their time per week managing their local development environment or waiting for builds and tests to complete. Since we've moved most creative workflows to the cloud, including processes like automated continuous integration and continuous deployment, how can we address the 'works on my machine' issue?

In this talk we will explore the topic of cloud development environments (CDEs) and how to remove friction from the developer experience through increasing velocity, collaboration, and control.

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George Tsiolis is a product designer at Gitpod, working on development environments and developer experience. He has been actively contributing to design and development efforts for open source design systems. He's passionate about design and engineering as well as remote culture and asynchronous collaboration.

Developer Experience is more than just documentation, static types, and feedback loops. It’s about, well, people. The type of person who enjoys a challenge for that warm fuzzy reward of telling their friends about what they’ve created and at the same time are highly skeptical of appearing to sell to them. So what’s the secret to doing this well? Taz will be talking about his Developer Experience and the key lessons learnt along the way.