She brought a whole new meaning to living in harmony with nature. Following ancient tradition and making the most of each season’s giving, she grew her own food, crafted furniture, dyed clothes, and redefined ‘from scratch’. She mastered the art of sustainable living and brought her stories to millions around the world. She made everything and could be anyone — a chef, an engineer, a farmer, a carpenter, a gardener, and a creator.
As I watched Li Ziqi over the years, experiencing an ideal lifestyle with nature in the deep countryside of rural Sichuan, I appreciated The Simple Life, and found peace and greatness. She bolsters my belief that the individual, as a creator, holds more power than any time in the past. The rise of the individual is real.
The rise of the Developer
Li Ziqi is among many creators in the New Renaissance — Anthony from Ace of Clay, John Plant from Primitive Technology are other examples. In the new era, human relevance, purpose and self-realization are at the forefront. Technology has made this shift real, more than any time in the past, helping bring creative minds together and where our future is more human, not less.
In this article, let’s explore ‘the developer’ creator and how she may build products and run businesses. Most developers, like Li Ziqi, love deep silent work and an unconstrained creation of awesome software. And software development is that grounded profession where you can make money if you solve people’s problems well and make them happy!
So how do we empower developers to deliver creativity at their best? How can we enable developers to do deep silent work, while bringing the human element, the customer into their creation? Such would be running your business with code. Let’s explore how we may do this with GitHub and DevRev.
Building software with GitHub and DevRev
There’s a lot to love about GitHub. It is where millions of developers and organizations are building, shipping and maintaining their software. The reason GitHub is so indispensable today is that it addressed problems that every software developer struggled with regardless of operating system, programming language and role. It has democratized coding and made it
- easy to use Git
- easy to collaborate on code
- easy to host (and find) open source projects
DevRev heart GitHub
GitHub has forever changed how people write and share code, and is now an essential platform for every developer. In this article, let’s discuss how DevRev can extend the awesome GitHub experience, and empower developers to build great software and run a long term sustainable business.
Bring the human, the Customer
DevRev is focused on bringing developers closer to customers and revenue. We strive to fill the missing seat, that of the customer as developers write and collaborate on code. The first step to writing awesome software and building a business is solving problems. Typical questions are — shall we solve problems that are highly specific experienced by a small group of customers, or are they big, ambitious products with a great potential market? Are we continuously solving painful problems and are we building sticky and impactful products?
Discovering customer wants and needs, and prioritizing against company goals, is still a complex problem today. It is difficult to distill signal from noise, and information typically gets lost across multiple systems and functions. Decisions on what to build may happen in isolation, with poor correlation to customer value and business impact. Product managers may source feature requests in a time consuming process, collating ideas from many disparate sources, in the form of customer support tickets, community discussions, user experience feedback, and also from internal sources, such as new market opportunities, platform refactoring plans and technical debt. Some may prioritize based on instinct, without a full understanding of impact and the right information on hand. Connecting Developers with Customers on One Platform
As code gets built into software that is operated in the cloud and delivered to customers, DevRev brings the context of the customer when developers build new features, fix bugs or address test regressions. When there is clear visibility of value chain from writing code, deploying microservices and delivering features that customers consume, we unlock -
prioritization: build what’s most valuable with issues prioritized against customer impact along with relevant customer records, eliminating subjective reasoning on what to work on .
attribution: triage customer defects, along with context such as cloud environment, logs and events and attribute to relevant microservices and libraries .
impact: bring honest visibility on engagement and churn, so developers see impact and avoid building shelfware *.
“Maintenance typically consumes 40 to 80 percent (average, 60 percent) of software costs.” Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, Robert Glass*.
In a world where developers spend an average of 60% of their time maintaining software, diagnosing issues, triangulating between data — logs, metrics, stack traces, source code repositories and tribal knowledge, GitHub and DevRev integration will automate tasks, leaving developers to focus on higher-order problems and get closer to their customers.
Develop products with agility
There is incredible power in seeing the world through the lens of products, as opposed to simply projects and agile methodologies. Projects represent activities an organization performs to achieve an objective and are typically ephemeral, and sometimes disconnect you from the macro objective, their customer. Alternatively, products are what connect the user with the developer — they bust organizational silos and provide a true north.
Connect code & microservices with customer-centric features, capabilities and products.
GitHub and DevRev integration enables meaningful organization of code from the developer-centric world of libraries and microservices to customer-centric world of features, capabilities and products, empowering developers with a new way to work -
- products, not projects: where developers build, operate, and support a shared asset, the product that binds everyone together.
- agility, not agile (methodology): where developers and customers engage and respond to change, while understanding relationships between micro services and customer consumables, such as APIs and features.
- catalog thinking: where developers appreciate the economics of pricing, inventory, supply, demand, cost, capital and nurture business-thinking ‘Product-centricity’ fundamentally changes how developers may work with their peers and how they organize their work.
Converging data across the software supply chain, starting with GitHub correlates code with products and meaningfully connects to customers.
Enable deep silent work
Creativity comes from deep work and achieving deep work time i.e., focused, distraction-free time for development, can be challenging! Fortunately, by organizing around code, the possibilities to let machines take care of shallow work are endless.
- Spend less time in meetings: eliminate manual updates to issues, by connecting GitHub pull requests and commits with DevRev, and providing stakeholders visibility of exactly what is being worked on.
- easy access to data: let developer be in charge through /commands that answer questions and access data from GitHub without going to multiple places.
- Integrate your tech stack: remove silos by integrating with your entire tech stack and tie alerts, customer usage and metrics back to code, saving time and bringing code to the center of your decision making GitHub and DevRev, better together !
