The Chief Developer Experience Officer – Alessandro Cauduro, Azion

This is Techstrong TV With a great pleasure today of being joined by Alessandra Karo. Alessandro is Chief Development Experience Officer, which is what we're gonna be talking about at Azon Technologies. It's great to be having with you, with us today.

Maybe your first tell us a little bit about azon, cuz that will help set up the context for the role that you're playing, if you would. Alright. Right.

Uh, thanks for having me Mitchell. So Ion is a leading edge computing platform. So we help our clients, uh, distribute their applications on protect applications across the globe.

We have over a hundred locations, so it's, it's, it's pretty complicated technology. So, uh, why, why are we talking about developer experience right now and why am am I in the company? I joined the company last year because it was, it was created by, uh, engineers.

So we're always very focused on having like a michel critical, uh, platform running. That's a hundred percent up time. It can never, it can never fail because it's running, uh, many e-commerce sites.

It's protecting many strategic, uh, banks, uh, and other very sensitive, um, solutions. So I can never, never downtown. So that's been the focus of the company since day one.

And, uh, I came on board because to help make this plan for me even easier for developers to start using it. So I take it there wasn't a chief Development Experience officer before you, you have established this role in the company, is that correct? Yeah, I know the, the owner of the company because, uh, previously I had my own company for 22 years where I worked building out, um, marketing, uh, digital marketing solutions for our clients.

So I have a lot of experience, uh, as a developer, as leading, developing the developing teams. And, um, I joined the team Hafael, the c e o asked me to join the team to help out with, uh, improving experience for developers. So I was one of the their clients before I, I joined on onboard.

So I know the pain points. I know many, many places where we can help them make things easier. So developer experience has become like a, a trending topic in the last few years where companies are saying, oh, I have the best developer experience.

So what, what does it mean to have a great developer experience? Developer experience is, uh, if you, if is in the simple terms, is very, is basically what's the experience that you're having with the product. Uh, this can, this can be good and this can be bad.

So if you, uh, you're gonna be targeting for having just great experience. Yeah. So in the case of as Azure where it's, it was very focused on creating features, they, they are like creating a very robust platform, but they are not, uh, with me joining the company with, we kept all, all this, uh, tech, uh, engineering stack that's very robust and focused on creating a, uh, robust, uh, developer experience for the, the end users as well.

So I think that's, uh, that's a winning combination. And if you think about it, generally developers would be, or, or people in doing development types of roles, whether it be pure software developers or SREs or platform engineers, you know, we're all kind of involved in that software stack, but they, they're in the way, in a way, they're their own persona. Just like we would in other user experience roles, say, here's the personas that might use my, my products.

Right? In this case, we're talking about edge and infrastructure and security, which trust me, developers will tell you very quickly if your stuff's easy to use, if it gets in the way or if it makes their job easier, you'll find out about it very quickly, which is always good. You want to know, right?

You wanna make it better for 'em. Yeah. So that's why they, we created this role.

It's not many, it's not very common. I think there's only two or three CD XOs in the world right now. So it's a very new role.

And, uh, one of the main things of creating this role is to give, to just send out a clear message. This is the focus of the company. Uh, and we, we don't like to say it's an area, I like to say it's a mindset because we can't achieve our goals as, uh, creating great developer experience if we don't work with the education teams.

If we don't, you work with the R C R E teams, if we don't work with all the engineering teams, if we don't use work with the product teams. So even though today we're an area, I like to say it's like a company mindset, uh, one of the things that we did to set this mindset was to establish that for 20 20 23, the strategic stream of the company was developer experience. Mm-hmm.

This was a very, um, uh, this worked very well. So everybody on board understands when we start discussing why are we focusing on creating a great developer journey, and as you said this, it don't have to really explain, uh, if, if you, if it's hard to use a product, you don't want to use it, you don't have time, it's very hard to learn things and, uh, The cognitive load of learning a new product or new technology, Yeah. Overload, I would say Overload.

I'm curious, so do you, do you, in starting this, do you, did you see your role as let's just kind of get everybody on the same playing field, uh, same idea of what, uh, uh, developer experience is and then how we design or how we build for improvements. And then did you kind of take it into specific areas where you're working on different parts of the offering to work on those aspects? Yeah.

Where was it kind of flipped? We have some gerian issues, let's go work on this, and then you kind of back up and drain Everything. Yeah, there are, there are some basic lay low hanging fruits they can fix.

Ok. But I like to think of, uh, the pillars of developer experience, uh, education so that the end user, because as you know, the developer may remain, uh, self-taught. So we have to provide good education paths so that they can onboard very easily.

I like to say, uh, for platforms that offer great developer experience, don't actually have to read the documentation. Mm-hmm. So that's a great, uh, goal to go to, but if they want to read the documentation, it has to be very easy.

It has to have all the tutorials. Yeah. Another, uh, PI pillar that we say developer experience is creating like starter kits, so assets that they can just start and get, getting things done very quickly so that they understand the value proposition and they start to get a hang of things.

Um, also building a community is important for developer experience because all the great tech companies, they have great developers, uh, around them. So we try and offer open source, uh, in as much as we can so that the community can, uh, give back as well and create and use our platform in ways that we, we don't, we have no idea what they're using it for. Mm-hmm.

Uh, so that's, uh, another area and developer tools and building blocks. So when we talk about, uh, when we say developer experience, it's very similar to user experience. The d main difference is because it's focused on developer principles.

So we're thinking about the life cycle, uh, when the developer is building, planning his code, developing his code, uh, deploying his code, testing his code. So we're looking at all this developer life cycle, how can we make his life easier during all this, uh, all these steps. Yeah.

And then when we talk about, uh, uh, the, the user interface for the developer is not just a web. So we can think about the APIs, we have to good, provide great APIs, provide a great C l I for automation, uh, a local environment so that he can test locally before deploying it to production, uh, an SDK that makes his life easier. And all these tools like integration with VS code, uh, and um, as much as we can offer these building blocks so that we can build on top of it.

I'm glad you went there when you started talking about APIs and, you know, BS code and things like that. Developers world are filled with tools and technologies and, uh, you know, GitHub from their i d e from the test tool that they're using to, you know, any number of things. Code scanning for security, pushing things out for a deployment CS e d pipelines for DevOps.

Right? It's, it's a sophisticated environment and I would imagine that's part of that experience too, of how do you seamlessly fit into that. I mean, there, there would be great ways to fit into then i d e and things that would really be a pain in the, you know, what if you didn't do it right and developers would just sidestep it cuz it's gets in the way.

Yeah. So that's, uh, I think one of the, the main skills that you have to have as uh, CD XO is to have empathy to understand the end, end user. So all these tools that I mentioned, uh, they're used in our day-to-day work.

So we have to think, we have to build them for the, for our end user. And we have to sta and we have to ask them, is it, is it, is it good? Is that what you need?

Uh, you have to talk to them and ask for feedback so that we can keep on improving what we, what we are building. Mm-hmm. Uh, so that's one of the things we also like to do to improve our developer experience is always to be talking to our end user.

Uh, we have a product board that they can, uh, feature, send feature requests so that it's always on our mind. And also we like to invite, uh, the, our, uh, clients that are really using our products profoundly to come and join in the team and talk and discuss what he likes, how he uses our platform so that we understand better what our, how, what our user look, uh, is actually using the platform for. So one thing is when you're creating the code and planning it out, another thing is when it's being actually used by someone in real world.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. You know, it, it seems like feedback is, is often best captured in the moment, right?

Like, oh, I struggled with this saying by the way, this would be really great if you'd had this feature or fix this issue. But there's also, we used to call it user testing, which doesn't sound quite right, but, you know, doing scenario testing, uh, you know, seeing people use the product. Do you still use some of those common techniques we use in user experience design, things like that?

UX design? Yeah. We, we use all the traditional UX design tools, like you said, user testing, creating prototypes.

One of the things that we've been doing lately is trying to use AI to speed up our development process. So we're, we're at the moment like exercising a new way of creating software inside the company where we have a, uh, our platform team creates the APIs for the platform and our product teams is gonna build on top of that. And the, and the on top of that we have the UX engineering that will actually be building out the interfaces.

So that can be the cli the, the, the tools or the, the web interfaces or the C L I. And uh, our idea is to like keep the platform, like I said, it's mission critical. So we can't make a single mistake.

It's has to go through lot, lots of steps until we release new versions. Uh, but we want to make the u ux part like very easy to change so we can, we can have, uh, test ideas, we can throw away things that don't work and try and so we can respond very quickly to user feedback. So that's one of the things we've been exercising a lot lately.

That's A good point. If you listen but don't do anything then kind of people in value, you listen, you're listening. I'm curious about, um, so edge, you know, as computing and applications at the edge, are there any things about that?

I mean, not everybody's developing apps for the edge, right? It's growing, you know, very fast, very quickly you think about that environment that might present some, um, interesting or unique challenges for you as a development experience officer. Yeah, so, uh, net computing platform is basically a decentralized, uh, platform.

So you, when you think about, uh, cloud Compu, uh, when you think about cloud, it's normally in a single location and our solution is distributed around the globe, like I said before. So it, it's not, it's not like a single company is gonna be building on something like this cuz it's very complicated for the developers are not gonna be building out this because it's very complicated. You have, you have to make things become in sync.

You have to think about, uh, so many technical difficulties to get this thing up and running. So in the developer experience sense of the world, we look at the trends. So one of the trends that we have right now for developers is using serverless.

So we don't, we don't want to be taking care of servers. Mm. I know Dev, I know DevOp teams do, but I mean the, a normal developer doesn't want to be focused on maintaining a server.

So Edge Computer is basically serverless from the the start. Uh, and there now there's a very big trend of developing Gem Stack applications. So basically you separate the front end from the backend.

Uh, the backend is normally api. So you start developing API first and you do the front end, uh, JavaScript, that's very reactive. So if we deploy this to the, the Edge, it's very close to the end user.

So say you live in New York and uh, and if your data center is based in San Francisco, that's gonna take a long time to go over there and come back. So when you use Edge Compute, you can have like a Edge location near in New York, you just go to New York and it's very quickly. So what we're doing is developer experience is making it very easy so that we can create, put the applications everywhere in the globe very with a click of a button, basically Making very transportable or transparent about where on the edge we are.

Right. Yeah. Well, great.

Um, Alessandro, it was very, very awesome, uh, very cool talking with you about this role and hopefully we'll see more of these types of roles, uh, springing up. I would imagine with the focus on developer productivity and platform engineering kinda returning, turn the eye back towards helping developers. Yeah, We are, we're living in, uh, I'd like to say we're like in the 2000 year where everything is like unstable and it's every cha ever changing.

So I think all, all companies are looking for it to add the AI at the moment to understand what's coming next. So I think it's very exciting time right now. It definitely is.

Well, where folks can, uh, can they, they check on, check out, um, you know, like a free account or some, uh, uh, possibilities of doing a little bit of edge computing applications at the Edge as developers or would you suggest the website or Yeah, Yeah. com and we have free credits for, to try out all the features in our platform and we can start understanding very about edge computing and accelerating applications. I bet lots of those good things around training and documentation, how people get started.

Exactly off on the right footer there as well too. Well, thank you Alessandra Cordero very, very much appreciate you coming by today. Hopefully we have a chance to talk again about developer experience or, or also edge computing.

Great. Both are great topics. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you.