This week on the podcast I was joined by Kent Wills, Director of Engineering Effectiveness at Yelp to learn about the evolution of Yelp’s developer productivity efforts over the past decade. In our conversation, we cover everything from how they tackled challenges with their monolithic architecture to scaling productivity initiatives for over 1,300 developers. Kent also touches on his experience building a business case for investments in developer productivity.
Listen to this podcast on Spotify, Google, or Apple Podcasts.
Topics covered:
(1:42) Forming the developer productivity team
(3:25) Why they named the team ‘engineering effectiveness’
(4:30) Getting leadership buy-in for focusing on this work
(7:54) Managing code ownership in Yelp’s monolith
(12:23) Supporting the design system
(16:00) The business case for forming a dedicated team
(19:45) How they’re approaching standardization
(23:50) How their approach to standardization might be different in another company
(27:08) Demonstrating the value of their work
(32:21) Building an insights platform
(38:47) How Yelp is using LLMs
Read the full transcript here.
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