Engineering Culture and Developer Productivity with James Carter at JFrog swampUP 2024

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone, it's Alan Shimel and welcome to our coverage of the 2024, uh, JFR Swamp Up Conference here in, uh, Barton Creek in Austin, Texas. Glad you can join us.

We're gonna be interviewing folks, uh, for the next two days, also giving you some recaps from the, uh, keynotes and so forth. Let me introduce you to our first guest today, and I'm glad he's on with us. His name is James Carter.

James is a distinguished engineer at Deloitte, and, uh, he has his little Deloitte DevOps Duck here joining Our Frog. 'cause after all, what can, if you don't have mascots, what are you, what are you gonna do? That's right.

Yes. Right. Hey, James, welcome to Tech Truck tv.

It's great to have you on. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Alan.

It's good to be here. So, as I mentioned, you're a distinguished engineer and we've had just most of the times, most of our distinguished engineers are from IBM. It seems they have a fantastic track, uh, along that.

But if you wouldn't mind sharing with our audience a little bit of your path to becoming a distinguished engineer, kinda your work history. Yeah, yeah, of course. So, so I've been with Deloitte about eight years.

I joined as a, uh, experienced hire from industry. So I didn't start my career at Deloitte. Um, and, uh, I was hired at a time, uh, into an innovation lab where Deloitte was on an experiment to create an engineering culture internally.

So the, my path with, with the Innovation lab and then to where we are right now within the, the innovation and technology group of Deloitte, uh, has been one of trying to bring about an engineering culture inside of what is essentially a consulting firm. So the titles that we use, such as principal engineer, distinguished engineer, technical fellow, are trying to reflect our engineering culture that we're trying to bring about. Excellent.

And if you wouldn't mind, I mean, you're here at Jfr Swamp Up. I'm assuming you have some interest in DevOps dev sec, but kinda where does that intersect for you? Yeah, it's been interesting.

We, um, one of the first things that we did, uh, when I got to the innovation lab was we noticed that we had lots of different teams focused on their own problems and trying to solve the same problems again and again. So the start of our DevOps journey, or of bring about a DevOps mindset within our engineering group was to try and bring about some standardization about how we work to make sure that when we're trying to meet compliance, we're doing and broadly the same way, um, and looking for opportunities to build tools and accelerators that can, you know, enable reuse. So we essentially started out as a continuous improvement initiative and then became the DevOps team.

Right? And then DevOps was suddenly a thing for the longest time. We weren't on the organization chart, we were the white space in between all the other boxes, uh, right.

Um, and then as things grown, we, you know, we are, we're now focused very much on engineering experience, and we are taking what we learned in the innovation lab and trying to play this at scale across all of us consulting, for example. Um, so that's really had to, we have to change the way we think as we scale up. So we've, we are talking less about DevOps, DevSecOps, everything ops And more talking about platform engineering.

And that's really the, I think, the evolution of DevOps into, uh, you know, a broader thing, uh, where we, we cross cut all of the silos and enable collaboration, integration, reuse, automation, uh, is really coming from this kind of platform mindset now. It's, I think that's the next evolution of, of DevOps. Got it.

I love it. Um, is this your first, uh, swamp up or you've been to several? It is, it's the first time I've been, I'm happy to be here.

The 10th anniversary. Yeah, it is. It's the 10th anniversary, so I've been to about half of 'em Uhhuh.

Uh, they, it's a good, it's a good, I like it because first of all, I like the Jfr culture, you know, the, the frogs themselves, but the people who are here are, they're kind of our people, if you know what I mean. I mean, it's not, I mean, there are people who are interested in DevOps and security and Cloud native and the kinds of things we talk about a lot. Yeah.

So, I I it's fertile for us. It's fertile ground, if you will. Yeah.

I feel like we've really been on a journey with Jfr as, as we've been here. We started out as a small innovation lab, and now we're a much bigger group. Um, and the products and services they provide us have grown with us.

Yeah. So we started out, we just needed an artifact repository, right? And then, and then we got, you know, as you know, the rise of DevSecOps and we went to make sure everything is secure, AppSec all the way through to SecOps.

Um, you know, they started to introduce products like x-Ray, so as well as scanning our code, you know, as we do our builds with, with tools like Sono Cube, um, you know, then we are able to start to stand scan stuff we've already shipped, do we, anything's in production, does it have an issue? Do we need to do a patch? So those capabilities started to come along and they've, um, really grown with us.

And I love the, the roadmap that goes all the way from curation all the way through to runtime. I love that story that it, it resonates with us in, in what we're trying to do, uh, within Deloitte. Um, I follow the kind of basic principles for AppSec of, uh, prevent, detect, remediate.

Yeah. And when I look at the offerings from J Rog, they're, they're checking those boxes for me. Um, we found you, you talked about how great the people are.

We've been working very closely with J Froog for a long time, and we've made some relationships and connections there, and that bears fruit. We, we feel like we have an influence on the roadmap. We feel like we are heard as a customer.

Yes. And in return, you know, we Jfr has been able to produce some enterprise grade features as a result of the collaboration with us. And that that's the ultimate win-win that you want with a, i I learned this from friends at IBM, you know, people can make fun of IBM and say what you want, but there's a reason they've been in business a hundred whatever years it's been.

And they, a person hired at IBM once told me the best customer relationships are not customer relationships, they're partner relationships. Exactly. I agree.

And, uh, and he would, yeah, it's a hundred percent true. Yeah. When a customer feels like they have a partner in you, you've done your job, I think, as a vendor.

Yeah. So it's, it's important. And, and that's, We really look for that.

Really great to hear We'd really look for that in our vendors. Um, so Jfr is a great partner, another great partner's GitHub. Yeah.

That leads us onto what we talk saw in the keynote today. Yeah. Yeah.

We saw that. Um, I remember a year ago or so, uh, having a conversation, uh, with Lyor in Atlanta when he came down to see us. And I was like, why are you guys not working closely together?

You're two, you are the core components of our engineering platform. I need you guys to work together and they're already working on it. Yeah.

And that we, today we see the, the fruits of that fact. We saw the fruits. I I think that's another big thing.

And it was really evident in the keynotes today, which is, Hey, you, you folks in the audience, you are our product. You know, that's, that's why we make these products based upon what you're telling us based upon that feedback. A perfect example was, I, I forgot what company it was, but they had a survey that said, you know, re re repatriation off of the public cloud to private was gonna eclipse public cloud.

But Jfr zone survey said, public cloud continues to grow. So their doubling down on, on that public cloud type of thing, I think they count their true north is the, are the people who come to these, to this event in particular. Yeah.

And, and that's what they can offer feedback. Um, we spoke a little bit about the GitHub integration. They, they spoke a little bit about an Nvidia partnership, though I think that was less, at least in the keynote, it was less defined than, than the GitHub.

Um, what else were some of your impressions so far of this day? Well, um, uh, I really enjoyed the, the presentation around the collaboration with GitHub. It, um, we were talking about this at lunch, and it was like, and the, and the presenters were saying, and there's one more thing and there's one more thing.

So it was a delight to see just how far they've been able to go in so short period of time. And I'm looking forward to see what comes next. Yeah.

Well, and I think that is also part of this platform play. Yes. Right.

I, I think that was one thing that Shlomi hit this morning, which is, you know, by 2027, 80% of CIOs don't want to deal with a whole bunch of point solutions. They want a platform for their DevOps, DevOps. Um, and I I think, again, that resonates.

Yeah. When I put my, uh, enterprise architect hat on, I'm trying to reduce the number of vendors I'm working with. I Think we all are.

I want to increase the partnerships I have with the vendors I have. I want to squeeze every ounce of functionality out the platforms that I'm buying from them, and I want them to work together. You know, what, as, as a CEO here at Tech and Group, I want the same things.

Not only with my technology, my go to markets, my marketing, uh, automations and everything. I hate. I mean, I live in a SaaS hell of, you know, we, we did this, we did a, uh, a review of exactly how many SaaS programs we have, and we're a small nothing company.

It boggles the mind. Yeah. How many SaaS programs you've got out there.

We've made the decision to, to really focus on our core business, you know, of, of really, really good at software engineering and less focused on running systems. So as we look to step up and scale up the number of developers that we're serving, you know, we started out small in the iLab with a couple of thousand developers. We, we stepped up under a level with the US consulting by 8,000 developers.

We are planning for 20,000 developers on our platform. Wow. So I want to spend less time managing self-hosted systems and invest in SaaS platforms that I can integrate.

Let me ask you a question about the number of developers, and that again, came up with the keynote this morning. What do you think about ai, generative AI in particular? Is that going to cause you to rethink about how many developers you want?

Or say, man, I just 10 x my 20,000 developers and a super force As, as a developer? That's where I go. The latter is like, I'm 10 Xing what I've got, um, I'm trying to help our, you know, our community of developers are split into internal facing, producing tools and softwares for our, our consultants to use.

And then we have our consultants around in the field who are also working with software. And the goal is to help them be more productive, to help them serve our customers and, and be more effective. Um, you know, the one of the questions was, you know, is AI gonna replace developers?

Well, I'm hoping it's gonna make developers more effective. I think, I don't, I think yet was the word that was maybe missing for that. We're not there yet.

Yeah. It's a great tool. It's a great accelerator.

But I, I believe that when we, we use tools like copilot, for example, we're heavily invested in that. It's a tool. It's not a replacement.

You still require someone who knows what they're doing to make sense of the output they're being given. It's getting better every day. But look, I I, you and I have both been around the block a few times, right?

These things. Yeah. These things, the way they work is, you know, they may replace that bottom 10% of functionality, but what they add to the top Yeah.

Is exponentially more. Well, You probably remember when 4G was the thing, right? Who me?

Well, Four GI remember early in my career, four GL was the thing, and developers are dead. We, we weren't gonna be analysts now. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

How did that work out? It's always the same, I think, and the, when they talked about the role of the AI developer, for example, I, I've personally, personally witnessed that during my career of, you know, engineers working with data scientists on machine learning and analytics projects and solutions and problems. Learning enough to become like a journeyman and being able to make sense of what the data science is asking about to implement it at scale.

So I think really we we're always gonna need developers, but the role is going to change. It will change. I I just had this conversation at lunch actually.

So we're always gonna need developers. I think the, the definition, we're gonna have more developers than ever, but what you may consider a developer may be different. If you say a developer is anyone who develops software, right?

I think everybody and their mom, and then some will be a developer. Yeah. I mean, 30 years ago there was a job title of programer.

Right? Now we talk about a developer, they were di they're different things. A programmer sat down, worked to a spec and just wrote code all day long, a developer has to think for a living.

Right? And I think, as I said, the definition of what a developer is and how they do it, that's gonna be the key. When people say, oh, we have more developers or less developers, or 20,000 developers.

Well, what exactly do you define a developer as? Because is it someone who's a prompt engineer? Could be.

Yeah. Right. Could be.

Who's to say? Anyway, James, I want to thank you for coming on. Take, I know it's a full day here and a full two days, but to pop in here and let us know, I love the Hal 9,000 shirt.

Open those pod bay doors. That's Right. Thank you so much, Alan.

It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank You.

Tony Carter here on, uh, tech Truck TV from Deloitte, a distinguished engineer and I didn't wanna embarrass him, but he's the first distinguished engineer in Deloitte, so kudos to you. Thank you. Thank you.

We're gonna take a break. We've got a lot more coming to you today from, uh, swamp up here in, uh, and where are we in Austin? Barton Creek.

But for now, we're out.