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Software at Scale

Software at Scale 23 - Laurent Ploix: Engineering Manager, Spotify

Laurent Ploix is an engineering manager on the Platform Insights team at Spotify. Previously, he was responsible for CI/CD at several Swedish companies, most recently as a Product Manager at Spotify, and a Continuous Integration Manager at Sungard.

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Highlights

05:40 - How CI/CD has evolved from a niche practice to a standard and expected part of the development workflow today

12:00 - The compounding nature of CI requirements

14:00 - Workflow inflection points. At what point do companies need to rethink their engineering workflows as they grow? How that’s affected by the testing pyramid and the “shape” of testing at your particular organization

20:00 - How the developer experience breaks down “at scale” due to bottlenecks, the serial nature of tooling, and the “bystander effect”. Test flakiness.

28:00 - How should an engineering team decide to invest in foundational efforts vs. product work? The idea of technical debt with varying “interest rates”. For example, an old library that needs an upgrade doesn’t impact developers every day, but a flaky test that blocks merging code is much more disruptive

33:00 - The next iteration of CI/CD for companies when they can no longer use a managed platform like CircleCI for various reasons.

40:00 - How should we measure product velocity?

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