David Stenglein’s Post

Want to know why most engineering teams building cloud native microservices are leaving 50% of their developer productivity on the table? It comes down to three feedback loops, and most teams get them wrong. After helping hundreds of engineering teams optimize their development workflow, I can tell you the pattern is always the same: The faster you can catch integration issues, the faster you ship. Period. These are the three loops every developer works with: 1. The inner loop is your flow state - write code, build, test locally. Minutes per iteration. 2. The PR loop adds your team - code reviews, CI checks, iterating on feedback. Could take hours. 3. The outer loop is where most teams hit a wall - trunk merges, staging deploys, integration testing. When something breaks here, debugging can take hours or days. Here's the thing: Traditional approaches keep integration testing in that outer loop. It's like building a complex LEGO set but only checking if the pieces fit together after you've built the whole thing. This is exactly why we built Signadot. By shifting integration testing left into the inner and PR loops, we're enabling developers to catch these issues when they're cheapest to fix - during development and code review. Our data shows teams using this approach ship 3x faster and eliminate integration-related rollbacks. Not because they're coding faster, but because they're catching the right issues at the right time. Curious about how we do it? Drop a comment or DM me. #developerexperience #shiftlefttesting #microservices

The 4 Evolutions of Your Observability Journey https://lnkd.in/gfTxqiYr When going on an observability journey, there tends to be a few concrete phases that every company goes through. Understanding how those unfold and take shape as you mature your observability practices can help you identify when you’ll run into certain types of challenges, and when you’ll start really wanting certain tools and practices to help address those challenges. That said, when you’re communicating about this to others, you might often find that it’s difficult to explain how you know where you are in the journey, or articulate the issues you’re running into. Often, people express difficulty getting a shared understanding around this, which is where mnemonics and mental models can come in handy. The known/unknown matrix in particular can be incredibly helpful in understanding where you are on your observability journey. In the known/unknown matrix, we have four stages: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. Each one corresponds to a different way of approaching three very crucial tasks in operating a system: asking questions, learning about the system and explaining what you learned. Those three tasks, in a nutshell, are what almost everything we do in platform engineering, observability, site reliability engineering (SRE) work, DevOps and more can be boiled down to. So let’s go over them and see how we can use the matrix to help understand where you’re at and share that understanding with others. Known Knowns Known knowns, when used to describe where you are on your observability journey, are the first stage. You know what question you’re asking and what you’re looking at. Here, you want to be able to look into the past and ask, “What happened?” Some examples: The website had a spike in errors. Where, how, why? The mobile app is experiencing more crashes in the latest version. Is it only buggy in the latest version? Our auth service is completely down, but only in one geographical area. What does that mean? Even though this is the first stage, this is actually one of the hardest ones. Most companies and most engineers never progress past this stage, and almost every tool and vendor you’ll encounter is primarily interested in this stage. That’s because this stage is all about the ability to ask meaningful questions about the past, and it turns out that “meaningful” is a tricky concept to nail down. If that wasn’t enough, figuring out how to get your tooling and systems to let you ask those questions is even harder. It’s no wonder most people get stuck here and can find themselves having a difficult time explaining why this is just the beginning of the journey. After all, if so many companies can be wildly successful without achieving this, you might wonder whether it’s even necessary to start this observability journey in the first place. Known knowns are about investigation. Truth be told, if you can’t sufficiently...

🔢 The 4 evolutions of your observability journey ✅ Embarking on an observability journey involves more than just the tools you use—it's about understanding the evolution of your systems and practices. In a recent The New Stack article, Hazel Weakly breaks down the observability journey using the known/unknown matrix: 1️⃣ 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻𝘀: Investigating the past 2️⃣ 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗨𝗻𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻𝘀: Analyzing patterns 3️⃣ 𝗨𝗻𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻𝘀: Experimenting for future outcomes 4️⃣ 𝗨𝗻𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗨𝗻𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻𝘀: Modeling your system's future Understanding these stages can help you better articulate where you are and where you need to go. Where do you see your team? 📍 Read the full article here ➔ https://lnkd.in/ggV2dKeT #OpenTelemetry #OTel #MobileObservability #Mobile #DevOps #SRE #Observability #ModernObservability #MobileApps #opensource #SDK #AppPerformance 

Does Backstage actually revolutionize developer tooling? Not if it doesn't include APIs 😉 Here, we consider how to use Backstage to catalog your internal API portfolio.

🌟🔔 Introducing Dependency Alerting for Refactor Impact! 🌟🔔 Many of us have faced it: making changes to one service while holding our breath, hoping it doesn't break anything somewhere else. 😅 With the increasing complexity of microservices, understanding the ripple effect of our refactoring has never been more crucial. That's where vizOps comes in! 🚀 Our platform generates alerts for any affected dependencies whenever a service undergoes refactoring. No more guessing games or last-minute surprises! We provide teams with real-time insights, keeping everyone in the loop and paving the way for smoother, more informed decisions. The benefits? Let’s break it down: - Faster Development: Identify impacts early, saving time and reducing errors. 🕒 - Enhanced Collaboration: Keep everyone informed and aligned. 💬 - Peace of Mind: Refactor with confidence, knowing that any issues will be flagged before they escalate. 😌 Unlike many tools that focus solely on runtime metrics, vizOps prioritizes a comprehensive view of architecture changes, making us a trusted ally for developers seeking clarity amid complexity. 🌀 Ready to experience this game-changing feature? Join our waiting list at https://vizops.io and dive deeper into our innovative approach with our documentation at https://docs.vizops.io. Together, let’s transform how we manage and visualize microservices! 🚀 #vizOps #Microservices #SoftwareDevelopment #Refactoring #TechInnovation

 In the rush to solve for “developer experience,” many organizations leap frog   over the foundation. The focus often jumps to more self-service tooling, or more reporting. But too many solutions don’t address the real bottleneck: the lack of clear, scalable ownership. Without ownership: ⚠️ Incidents drag on as teams scramble to find the right point of contact.  ⚠️ Standards like security and compliance fall behind. ⚠️  Developers spend more time firefighting than innovating. Our latest blog breaks down why ownership is the foundation of true developer experience and engineering excellence—and how Cortex solves it at scale. ✅ Persistent, actionable ownership  ✅ Automated accountability with scorecards  ✅ Real-time visibility across the org It’s time to rethink dev experience. Start with ownership. Read the blog here: https://lnkd.in/gjkxW8Kx

Stateful in the last Product Hunt newsletter: “Stateful wraps Runme's powerful DevOps notebooks into an out-of-the-box platform that unlocks critical docs that actually work when your team needs them.” I dig the description, thanks folks! 🙏 https://lnkd.in/gFFzrYHd

"Building a product is one thing. Building the right product? That’s an ongoing conversation." When we launched Martini v1 in 2019, we thought we had built the perfect integration platform. But our users challenged us to rethink everything. They needed a solution that wasn’t just powerful—but one that made collaboration effortless between developers and non-technical teams. So, we listened. We adapted. And today, Martini v2 is proof of that evolution. Workflows now make integration and automation more visual, more intuitive, and more collaborative than ever before. This journey reinforced something I truly believe: the best innovations come from listening to the people who use your product every day. Read more about what changed: https://ow.ly/OEjE50UPePR Would love to hear—has user feedback ever made you rethink an entire approach?

When you add a new feature to your code, are you introducing new concepts? And if so, do you take the time to discuss those concepts with your product owner, stakeholders, or teammates? If not, it’s worth doing. Putting those concepts back into the ubiquitous language, making them explicit in your conversations and code, helps strengthen shared understanding. It also keeps your model from weakening and prevents your code from drifting away from the domain it’s meant to reflect. Bruno Boucard #DomainDrivenDesign #SoftwareDesign #SoftwareEngineering

🚀 CI/CD: A Hidden Gem When Working in Production .. . Haha, no, I’m not joking! CI/CD is like that one tool that lets you relax even when you’re in production. Let me give you an example: 🐛 Bug Killer Mode ON CI/CD fixes bugs before they hit production. Just think—fixing bugs after production is like throwing money down the drain, plus a lot of panic and stress. Fixing them before? All you need is some attention and quick action. ⚡ Faster Releases = No More Manual Headaches Once you build your CI/CD pipeline, you can forget about manual production stress. It handles deployments automatically—no late-night hustle, no sweating! ☕ Quick Changes Without Downtime Imagine you want to make a small update to your project. With CI/CD, you don’t need to restart production. Just push the change, and CI/CD handles the rest. You? Just chill, sip your coffee, and enjoy! 📈 Scaling? CI/CD + Kubernetes = Perfect Combo These two are like best friends. No matter how big your app gets, they handle scaling like pros. No crashes, no headaches—just smooth sailing. #DevOps #CICD #Automation #BugKiller #ProductionHero