Developer Experience: It’s Time to Start Complaining | Gradle's Justin Reock

**Justin Reock** (0:00)
It is staggering, the amount of toil and friction and frustration that engineers are willing to put up with.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:09)
Can I borrow this quote?

**Justin Reock** (0:09)
Absolutely, please do, because I think it's essential. I mean, it's so spot on to kind of why we haven't solved these challenges, because nobody's complaining, right? I mean, it's just accepted that this is almost like an occupational hazard.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:24)
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Welcome to the show.

**Justin Reock** (1:17)
Thank you.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:18)
I'm super excited to have you here. With us we have Justin Reock. He is the field CTO and chief evangelist for Gradle.

**Justin Reock** (1:24)
That's right.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:25)
Thank you so much for joining us.

**Justin Reock** (1:26)
Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk with you today.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:29)
And for those of you who aren't watching on YouTube, this is obviously Conor Bronsdon. I'm your Dev Interrupted co-host and we're here live at DevOps Enterprise Summit for another incredible episode. We've had a chance to have really interesting people on the show.
And Justin, we met here at DevOps Enterprise Summit and said, hey, let's get you in here. Let's do a recording. Let's have a bit of a conversation. But before we dive into why we want you on the show, let's hear about how'd you get to be where you are and CTO at Gradle.

**Justin Reock** (1:54)
Yeah, yeah, sure. So my story began when I was a teenager and played with languages like Perl and things like that when they were out. So that took me down a path of working for companies and evangelizing the use of open source and the enterprise, right?
Doing it in a way that was safe and secure and responsible, but then also being able to reap all the productivity benefits that come from being able to get your hands on high quality software quickly and let that augment your work. So that really got me thinking a lot about productivity, productivity in general. I mean, open source, it's like, yeah, the license is free, whatever, but the old sort of free is in free speech versus free beer still kind of holds up, right?
It's boring to me that there's not a license cost associated. What's really interesting is the freedom and flexibility that you have to use this software kind of in any way that you want. And so I worked at a company called Open Logic for a while. I became their field CTO. My job was to, you know, the commercial team as well as our customers and advocates about the importance of things like open source governance policies and its effect on productivity, which took me to Gradle about a year and a half ago. Gradle has been working on a new practice called Developer Productivity Engineering, which we're kind of seeing as like the next shift in consciousness for the industry, thinking more about developer experience and how we can improve that. So when I saw what they were doing, I was like, this is what I want to work on. It's getting to the point where you go to an open source show and you're like, hey, you should have an open first policy because open source is great. And people are like, yeah, we know, thanks.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:24)
It's been a couple years now.

**Justin Reock** (3:27)
So you were right.
So it was interesting to see this new practice and something I felt like I could really be passionate about and kind of get behind. And it's been great. I think we hit the market at just the right time when people are starting to think about this stuff.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:40)
It's great when you have that feeling, isn't it? And to your point, you've seen this open source revolution happening, and now you're at, I think you'd call it maybe the next stage of like, okay, developer productivity engineering. Let's start with defining that for our audience. What does that mean to you?