9 Steps to Owning Your Code

Own Your Code As technology increasingly shapes business objectives, the role of the software developer is also rapidly changing. Digital natives are disrupting every industry vertical and businesses are expected to innovate, respond, and be available to their customers 24x7. To meet these demands, developers — the architects of customer experiences — are being pushed towards owning their own code. Developers know their code and can fix it faster than anyone else and are able to ship more performant code when they are accountable for managing it. It makes sense that leading organizations are tasking developers with both development and operational responsibilities as the best way to maximize speed, agility, and application performance and quality. Managing your code is something to be excited about. Establishing this accountability empowers you with the information and control to ensure the services you build are production-ready and high-performing. It ensures you are doing high value work, as you have direct line of sight into how your product or service is actually performing and impacting your customers’ day-to-day. And as the customer experience is in your hands, you drive the success of your organization, as well as your own destiny. This all sounds great, but what exactly does this mean for you? It means that on-call and first-level response is no longer just the responsibility of a centralized NOC or an individual operations team on the other side of a wall. Rather, being on-call will inevitably be a fundamental expectation of you as a developer (if it isn’t already), regardless of your organization’s size or operational framework. It is now best practice for those who build services to also be accountable for the success of those services in production. This, of course, is in addition to existing, daily software development responsibilities. Clearly, this introduces significant challenges and the notion of being on-call can be anxiety-inducing on both professional and personal levels. From talking to thousands of developers, we’ve found that these are some of the things that are top of mind: HOW DO I FULLY UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING THAT IMPACTS MY SERVICE AND MY CUSTOMERS’ EXPERIENCES? HOW DO I ASSESS THE IMPACT AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE? HOW DO I ENSURE I DON’T WASTE MY TIME DOING AUTOMATABLE THINGS? HOW DO I FIND OUT ABOUT MY PROBLEMS BEFORE MY CUSTOMERS NOTICE? HOW DO I MAKE SURE THIS ISSUE DOESN’T HAPPEN AGAIN? WHEN I NEED HELP, HOW DO I PULL IN THE RIGHT PEOPLE AND GET THEM UP TO SPEED AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE? CAN I WORK MY WAY AND WITH THE TOOLS I LIKE? HOW DO I ENSURE I’M ONLY WOKEN UP FOR CUSTOMERIMPACTING ISSUES? HOW CAN I CONSTANTLY LEARN TO BOTH IMPROVE RESPONSE AS WELL AS BUILD A MORE RESILIENT SERVICE?
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