Deeply caring for developer experience

[00:00:00] Michaela: Hello, and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. McKayla, and today I have the pleasure to talk to Ashley Hansberger. Ashley is Director of Developer experience at Tackle io. But before I start, let me tell you about my latest project. Awesome cos.com. Yeah. All my work on Culture Views has now its own dedicated home at awesomecodereviews.com.

You find articles about code review best practices code review checklists, news about the latest research on code reviews and of course workshops and courses I offer around this topic. So please hover over to awesomecodereviews.com and check out my latest work. But now back to Ashley.

Ashley is a vivid speaker and proponent of testing, and she loves to share her experience in conferences during blogging, all about testing and engineering productivity.

Before she was working at Tackle.io, she was the director of DevOps engineering at Black. So I'm super, super thrilled to pick her brain today and, you know, learn all about her experience. Welcome to the show Ashley.

[00:01:08] Ashley: Thank you so much for having me. I'm, I'm so happy to be here. .

[00:01:14] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. I'm really, really happy.

So I want to start really at the beginning. I know that you have been a tester at the start of your career. Yes. So how, how come that you're now, you know, the director of developer experience, how did you come into developer advocacy and so on, but what's, what's that

[00:01:30] Ashley: path? , I'll try to give the short story, but it might become a long and winding journey, but that's okay.

Yeah, I did start as a tester and, you know, went from manual testing and I'm not even gonna say how many years ago, because it feels like ages ago and it was, but that's okay. . So I started as a manual tester and as many companies go, you know, started to learn automation and really found a passion for leading that effort.

So I went from tester test lead. Test architect into really becoming a technical product owner. How do I start advocating the voice of what is needed technically to balance against the features needed so that we can think about how do we design and create the frameworks and develop the automation that we need to get the feedback loops in place for our code?

That kind of led me down to a path of really thinking about testing and continuous delivery and adopting DevOps principles of like flow and feedback and continuous learning and thinking about DevOps from a culture perspective. And once we had a reorg, I was asked to lead release engineering. Now that became a really interesting experience for me, not knowing a whole lot about release engineering, but being able to lead people and thinking about our infrastructure as code and how do we even test our infrastructure.

And guiding a team of DevOps engineers to be able to do just that. As we develop a microservice oriented architecture, how do we create the, the easiest path forward for a team to spin up a service, develop what they need to, and not have to worry about the underlying architecture behind, behind the microservices that they need to create.

So my team creates the Pav road at that point. But what I really found I was most passionate about was bringing people together, learning how to work together and really focusing on people and their experiences at work. I was also asked you, as you mentioned, I've been speaking in the industry a lot about testing.

But what I really found it was about, at the heart of it, was how do we advocate for these ideas and the ways in which we should deliver software? So I was also asked to start thinking about how do we influence an organization through change for an idea that we wanna implement at, at that point, it was agile and how do we scale that across an organiz?

So I got to start thinking about, well, how do we approach change as humans? And, you know, thinking about the, how our bodies and our minds react to change. How do we move through that change, whether it's positive or negative, we, we need to be able to move through it. And I started really getting interested in the psychology of change and how we do that and influence it through other people.

But at the end of the day, we also have to be effective. And what makes effective. Psychological safety. And so I really started developing not just the, well, what are the things that we're trying to do as a team, but, but how do we do that? And what are the things that we need? And so I really got into a deep dive of looking at Amy Edmondson's work and psychological safety.

How do we apply it and learn about our own teams through those mechanisms and start building the, the underpinnings of hav