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Can devs discover your platform from the toilet?

This paper from Google engineer productivity researchers examines the effectiveness of 1-page printed newsletters written by devs and posted in restrooms for the purpose of promoting awareness and adoption of software tools and practices, a tactic called “Testing on the Toilet” or TotT. It also compared TotT to other tactics such as social media, email announcements, and peer learning.

Here’s how their findings can help you sell your Internal Developer Platform to your devs 👇

• TotT works for most tools because of the toilets. 🚽 Researchers found that newsletters posted to the bathroom performed better than the same posters posted ar an annual project fair. The discrepancy was attributed to poor placement at the job fair and the fair’s audience being too broad.

• Social media can help drive awareness, with a small caveat: unlike with printed newsletters, the magnitude of the impact depends on the dev’s personal network. Consider if social media is a viable medium to promote your platform given the size of your platform advocates’ network.
• Targeted emails to relevant mailing lists effectively boosted users, but not for as sustained a period of time as TotT. One explanation raised by the researchers is that emails are more likely to be deleted or buried under new emails than a single newsletter displayed in the bathroom for an indefinite period of time.
• Devs reported learning about tools from peer devs. This is why platform advocacy is so important. Create opportunities for users to show how the platform is adding value.
• Platform design still matters. Is your platform easy to try? Is it relevant to your developers’ responsibilities? Is it intuitive to use? If the product is a dud, better advertising won’t fix your adoption problem.

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َQuick Bites

• According to the latest DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report – July 2023, “the evolution of platform engineering involves a shift toward simplification, focusing on value delivery, and adopting a platform-as-a-service mindset.”
• Which is concerning, to say the least. If you’re getting a PaaS, you aren’t following a platform as a product approach. And a product mindset is the key to building a platform your devs actually want to use.
• Like any other tool, generative AI can pose a DevOps cybersecurity risk if you aren’t careful. Surprise, I guess?
• Does ChatGPT help or hurt your devs’ productivity? According to this article, ChatGPT both helps debug code and outputs buggy code. 😆

Upcoming Webinars

• Many teams want to enable PR and ephemeral environments for their devs, but they struggle to maintain consistency across environments, integrate optimally in the workflow of devs, and keep costs low. If you can relate, this next webinar is for you.

• Build multi-region resilient applications emphasizing chaos engineering | Teja Swaroop Mylavarapu, Lead Software Engineer at Capital One | July 27, 2023 | 9:00 PM CEST | 3:00 PM EDT
• Cracking the code: Single pane of glass in observability | Sean Alvarez, Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks, Inc | August 1, 2023 | 9:00 PM CEST | 3:00 PM EDT
• SaaS success secrets: Dynamic tenant provisioning in cloud infra & automation | Jaroslav Vojtek, Senior DevOps Engineer at Labyrinth Labs | August 2, 2023 | 7:00 PM CEST | 1:00 PM EDT
  

Community Highlights

Have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. Here are the highlights from this week:

• A deep learning team needs a platform for model inference: what's the best solution?
• How to integrate an IDP development with GitOps
• Searching for tools with real time reflection (without polling) of config values
• Has anyone used Terraform to create a cloudwatch dashboard monitoring read/write events in an s3 bucket?

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

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