Productivity is Messing Around and Having Fun

What happens when you get two people who are passionate about productivity and fun, and put them on stage together?

Abstract

What is the happy path, for developers? It’s less boredom, and more play.

Developer satisfaction, developer joy, and business results are strongly correlated. And yet - many of our jobs are frustrating, filled with friction, and free of joy. What’s going on? How do we fix that? Is annoying waste inevitable? Can developer performance be tuned? Are productivity measurements helping or hurting us? How do we deal with fear at work? Will AI take our jobs? Finally, how can you persuade management to invest in boredom?

Holly is an expert on play at work, unwise automations, and polar bears. Trisha is an expert on performance tuning, tooling and productivity. Come to this talk to find out what these topics have in common.

Video

I created a shorter "TL;DR" version of the talk (9 mins) for the Continuous Delivery channel.

Slides

Resources

Articles and videos

Books

(Contains affiliate links)

Products

Authors

  • Trisha Gee

    Trisha is a software engineer, Java Champion and author. Trisha has developed Java applications for finance, manufacturing and non-profit organisations, and she's a lead developer advocate at Gradle.

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  • Holly Cummins

    Holly Cummins is a Senior Principal Software Engineer on the Red Hat Quarkus team. Before joining Red Hat, Holly was a long time IBMer. In her time at IBM, Holly has been a full-stack javascript developer, a WebSphere Liberty build architect, a client-facing consultant in the IBM Garage, a JVM performance engineer, and an innovation leader.

    View all posts Senior Principal Software Engineer