Finding the Best Gen AI Use Case for Your Dev Team | Sonar’s Peter McKee

**Peter McKee** (0:00)
We're so early, I don't think the learnings are there yet to be able to give really, really good concrete prescriptive advice, right? I think companies are only going to have to learn some of that as they go, right? What are the problems? How does upping the amount of code and the speed that we're trying to move at, how is that affecting things? Is it working? Is it not working? Is there certain types of code? Is it back end that does better with GENAI right now? As opposed to React or Angular that might be a little framework based and less language based, right? Yeah, I don't have anything very prescriptive other than I would think start as a normal engineer, start small, build upon that, go slow, you know, walk, crawl, run. And as an engineer, I think you need to fight back that with the business, right? The business you still need to push. I think you need to push, right?
But I think we walk through it slowly.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
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**Dan Lines** (1:20)
Hey everyone, what's up and welcome back to another episode of Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO. And today, I'm joined by Peter McKee, Vice President of Developer Relations and Community at Sonar. Welcome to the show, Peter.

**Peter McKee** (1:41)
Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here, glad to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:43)
We were joking before, I love that title. That must be a really fun job to have, to be a VP of Developer Relations. How is that for you?

**Peter McKee** (1:54)
It's great, it's great. I was a software engineer for 20 some years, 25 years or so, really enjoyed it. I thought I was going to be the guy you put in the dark room, slid pizzas to leave alone. And I was that in the early career, but as you can't tell, I turned out to be this smiley talkative engineer. And when I was at Docker, they were like, this role might be good for you. And yeah, I love it.

**Dan Lines** (2:15)
I love it.

**Peter McKee** (2:15)
You get to talk about tech, stay involved in it, be hands on. But I don't have any deadlines for production on the dev team. So, you know, there's that. So I really, really enjoy it.

**Dan Lines** (2:25)
I think it's, yeah, you thought you were going to live off of pizza, Mountain Dew, maybe some Reese's Pieces. I remember that's what I see a lot Reese's Pieces when I was a developer.

**Peter McKee** (2:33)
I love Reese's. Yeah.

**Dan Lines** (2:35)
But you're the guy that can also talk, smile, be on a pod, relate to people. Who gave you your first shot at it? You said it was Docker?

**Peter McKee** (2:44)
Yep, it was Docker.

**Dan Lines** (2:45)
That's cool.

**Peter McKee** (2:46)
Yeah, we had a sold off the enterprise business to a company called Mirantis, and we kind of started over and recapitalized. I kind of lucked out, right? Because it was a huge community already. Docker had a massive brand. So it was, you know, it was able to kind of step into that brand. So yeah, it was a great first DevRelation role. I loved it.

**Dan Lines** (3:04)
Love it. That's really great. Yeah. Thanks for sharing your background a little bit. I know like some of the developers listening and stuff may be like, how do I get a shot at that? Like, what do I need to do to be like Peter? But today, we are going to continue. So my co-host, Conor and I have been interviewing leaders from across the engineering spectrum. We have this series going on on Gen.AI, obviously like the hot topic, variety of viewpoints on different approaches with AI and what does it mean for developers. So it's been really fun so far to get everybody's perspective. So I guess we'll start out, Peter, like what's your perspective on how Gen.AI is impacting software development processes? You can take it from wherever you want to take it from.