The Developers focus, the Team quickens

Today we find that in larger organizations there is a tendency that the management and oversight of development projects is given more importance than the actual value created by people writing, iterating and shipping code. That’s not always the case, and at times the humble developer may feel like a forgotten asset, an opinion without foundation. However, the C-suite’s focus on longer-term strategies can sometimes lead to an overemphasis on process and management, rather than real-world code creation. And that’s a problem.

This problem is not just limited to software houses or development teams. There are arguably spurious middle management levels in public and private organizations around the world, and these levels often indicate an over-focus on planning and process management. Isn’t it about time that we focused more on the frontline developers for the companies whose lifeblood depends on the quality of their software deliverables? Finally, in today’s competitive IT climate, skilled developers are a resource that doesn’t come cheap, and top talent isn’t readily available. Maximizing a developer’s value to the business must be high on the priority list to keep the business operating at peak efficiency.

If you ask many developers about efficiency and productivity, decision-makers will be surprised by the answers. developers say that they only spend 11.5 hours a week, which is about 40% of their time, to code new features and improvements. They spend the rest of the week on non-coding activities like maintaining internal tools, setting up pipelines and automation, waiting for CI pipelines to run, waiting for builds and tests, or setting up development environments. When you add third-party solution integration into the mix eg databases, security, API management, developers’ productive time is reduced even further. In short, there are a ton of other activities too numerous to list that are required to create working applications.

Creating modular developer workspaces allows developers to focus on just a few tasks to achieve a specific outcome with the peace of mind that aspects of the project such as networking, database accounts, and security are being handled by complementary microservices. Recently, we’ve seen an explosion of developer-centric container tools, from BASH scripts that create containerized sandboxes to IDE/editor plugins that help boot containerized environments.

The problem here is that few tools abstract away much of the container-specific complexity that a production-ready Kubernetes deployment requires. Fortunately, a commitment to innovation is at the heart of everything we do at SUSE, and our solutions help developers meet both container deployment challenges and developer productivity.

• SUSE rancher, one of the most widely used container solutions, takes care of many cross-cutting issues such as background management, security, and deployment details that distract developers. It combines customized container-based development environments for teams and individuals, allowing developers to focus on creating value instead of worrying about the details.
• We all know that Kubernetes is complex. Still, it’s possible to have a smooth experience with it. Developers, both new and experienced, can use Rancher desktop Easily create a lightweight Kubernetes development environment on their desktop machines and start programming with their favorite IDE like Visual Studio Code. extensions are available to facilitate the onboarding of new team members. This is where you create custom development environments that run consistently on developer machines.

While developers are arguably some of the most creative and talented in IT, they too have to move with the times. Hence the growing need to provide upskilling and reskilling opportunities in development teams. For example, not all programming languages ​​are well-suited to cloud-native development. Newcomers to the block like Go and Rust are good to go, but veterans like Java, C, and C++ are arguably less so. Familiarizing teams with containerization technologies and approaches also includes some refresher on microservices-focused languages, libraries, and frameworks. However, once armed and equipped with solutions like SUSE Rancher and Rancher Desktop, a developer’s code-to-cruft ratio will increase, making individual developers more productive and focused, as well as allowing teams to get their projects into production faster.

If you haven’t tried SUSE Rancher yet, we’re here to help! find out more here.

Vishal Ghariwala is Chief Technology Officer for the APJ and Greater China regions at SUSE, a global leader in true open source solutions. In this role, he works with customer and partner executives across the region and is responsible for raising awareness of SUSE by being the executive’s technical voice to the marketplace, press, and analysts. He also has a global charter with the SUSE Office of the CTO to assess relevant industry, market and technology trends and identify opportunities that align with corporate strategy.

Before joining SUSE, Vishal was Director for Cloud Native Applications at Red Hat, where he led a team of seasoned technologists responsible for the growth and adoption of Red Hat’s OpenShift, API management, integration, and business automation portfolios in the were responsible for the entire Asia-Pacific region.

Vishal has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Electronics from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Vishal is here on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalghariwala/