Managing Developer Ownership at Yelp

About Kent Wills:

Currently leading the Core Experience (search, home, biz) group at Yelp, Kent led and was a part of Yelp's developer productivity group for the past 10 years, from a group of 6 to 70 as Yelp scaled from 200 engineers to over 1300.

References

Recommended Book List: https://kentwills.notion.site/Leadership-c6e419523ca8407fb5c0454791e021be

Pre-commit: https://pre-commit.com

Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
02:11 Transition from Monolithic to Service-Oriented Architecture
08:25 The Importance of Clear Code Ownership
16:22 How ownership information is used at Yelp
24:47 Yokyo Drift: Automating Dependency Bumping and Code Modifications
34:02 Looking forward - DevProd at Yelp
39:14 Rapid fire questions

Summary
Kent Wills, Head of Developer Productivity at Yelp, discusses engineering effectiveness and ownership at Yelp. He shares the journey of Yelp's engineering organization and the challenges they faced with a monolithic codebase. Kent explains how they transitioned to a service-oriented architecture and the benefits it brought in terms of code ownership and productivity. He also talks about the tools they built internally, such as the ownership system and Yokyo Drift, to improve engineering effectiveness. Kent highlights the importance of using existing tools like Backstage and the potential of AI-powered coding assistance in the future.

Keywords
Engineering effectiveness, ownership, Yelp, monolithic codebase, service-oriented architecture, code ownership, productivity, tools, Backstage, AI, coding assistance

Takeaways

• Transitioning from a monolithic codebase to a service-oriented architecture can improve code ownership and productivity.

• Tools like Backstage can help with cataloging ownership and dependencies in a large organization.

• Yelp built internal tools like the ownership system and Yokyo Drift to improve engineering effectiveness.

• AI-powered coding assistance has the potential to further enhance productivity and reduce repetitive work.

• Using existing tools and platforms can save time and effort compared to building everything in-house.