Making Your Code More Human w/ GitHub’s Christina Entcheva
Plus, how HubSpot turns data into dollars, a celebration of code-review automation, why you should hire devs differently, and shopping robots.
The world is what we make it. Tech - and AI - follow the same principles.
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we sit down with Christina Enchevta, a Director of Engineering at GitHub, to unravel the link between the values we hold and the things we build. We delve into how AI applications mirror our values, intentionally or not, and how this can lead to surprising outcomes, no matter how benevolent our intentions.
Christina also shares practical advice for engineering leaders on how to take and provide constructive feedback, dismantle information silos, and infuse your values into the product development process.
“If you’re going to do AI, know the history, know how it works, and pursue it with a diverse group of people.”
Episode Highlights:
(1:27) GitHub's secret sauce
(5:05) Being transparent with your dev team
(11:30) Providing constructive feedback
(17:45) Generative AI & art
(22:40) Dismantling information silos
(26:50) What devs should be excited about
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. How HubSpot Gets Value From Their Data
Data without an effective way to get value from it is worse than useless, it’s costly and can be dangerous. There are some proven, intriguing ways to think about using data in engineering, but it’s also smart to see how other data teams make the most of the numbers and insights they’re receiving every second. Case in point:
drawing back the data-value curtain at HubSpot.2. Upvote The Long-Overdue Automation Of Pull Request & Code Reviews
Consciously or unconsciously, engineering orgs have been feeling the pain and toil of pull requests and code reviews.
But just how bad is the state of pull requests?
- The average cycle time for a piece of work was 7 days.
- Half of all PRs were idle for 50% of their lifespan.
- Cycle time doubled when pull requests went from 100 lines of code to 200 lines of code.
Well no more! gitStream is a free dev tool that allows your engineers to automatically:
👩💻 Auto-assign expert reviewers
⏱️ Add estimated time to review tags to pull requests
🚦Segment pull requests by risk to the repo (low risk vs. medium risk vs. high risk).
✅ Introduce the option of auto-approving low-risk PRs.
👮 Automatically flag security risks for additional scrutiny
gitStream just launched on Product Hunt and it would love an upvote from you to help spread the word!
3. Rethinking Where You Hire Tech Talent
If all of tech is thinking about how to become more efficient in 2023, shouldn’t tech hiring be trying to up its game as well? They probably should since the industry is spending $17 billion a year on executive search. Datapeople's Maryam Jahanshahi has ideas on where to start 👇
This week’s Download is sponsored by the Benchmark → Automate → Improve Summer Workshop Series.
Benchmark. Automate. Improve. These are the most important themes that drive elite engineering organizations. That’s why we’ve set up three workshops over the summer on how to practically apply each of these to your own development teams.
Benchmarks focuses on how elite engineering teams use metrics. Automate looks at how automation has been used at elite orgs to improve developer workflows. Improve is a guide on how the top 10% of teams allocate developer resources.
4. There are separate online stores just for robots
In this week’s update on the disconnect between humans and AI comes an eye-opening story from
on how a decade of chasing Google’s algorithm has forced companies to build ecommerce sites for us and then ecommerce sites for robots.Read: A storefront for robots