How to Increase Adoption of Internal Developer Tooling | Bloomberg’s Luis Vega

**Luis Vega** (0:00)
I was so excited about it, because it was such a technical challenge, that I started coding all of the critical parts.
And I didn't realize I was literally blocking the team, because the team was waiting on that big infrastructure that was gonna connect all the pieces together. That realization of like, you're not here to be the star in the code. You're here to make sure they become the star. So when it really hit me that like, I just needed to get out of the way of the tough technical coding, things really start happening.
But I really wish people think about this now that are becoming managers for future managers, because they will not have to get burned so many times. And you know, people have to learn sometimes by getting burned, they can go ahead, do the critical part and learn yourself. But that's the one lesson I will tell any future engineering manager.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
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**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:21)
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm Ben Lloyd Pearson, Director of Developer Relations here at Linear B.
Today, I'm joined by Luis Vega, an engineering manager at Bloomberg. Luis, it's great to have you here today.

**Luis Vega** (1:36)
No, it is my pleasure to join you. And like, I'm pretty excited to be in this bubble.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:40)
A dome, please. Dome, I'm sorry. So you were recently recruited to lead a team that owns, revamps, and creates applications for Bloomberg's JavaScript framework, which is used by thousands of developers across the company. And your goal was to develop internal tools that follow many of the same application development, research, and UX design principles that are used in Bloomberg's client-facing tools.
So from what we understand, the challenge was not only that there were very few internal tools at the company to aid you in that process, but the ones that existed weren't very well embraced by developers, even including yourself. So I want to dive into what it took to revamp the internal applications at Bloomberg and the path that you followed to become a manager along the way. I think that sounds like a pretty interesting story. But before we jump in, because we may have an audience that's not as familiar with Bloomberg, can you tell us just what is Bloomberg?

**Luis Vega** (2:39)
Yeah, absolutely, so you probably heard from Bloomberg if you got to like the news or if you happen to be on a Bloomberg TV channel, but that is actually not what we do. Those are just information sources that feed to the Bloomberg terminal. So Bloomberg, a main product is called Bloomberg Terminal and it really powers financial professionals around the world. If you really want to do serious stuff in finance, you need a Bloomberg terminal, basically how it works. The best way to think about it, imagine your phone and you have obviously tons and tons of applications from your app store or Play Store, whatever. The Bloomberg terminal has over 20,000 applications. We call them functions. You're going to hear me say that a lot.
Installing to the Bloomberg terminal on the get-go. So somebody with access to the terminal can basically type one to four letters and run one of these applications.
The internal tools use the same technology. Talk about eating your own food. So in order to make an internal application, you can also use the same technology and the same things, and we put it in the Bloomberg terminal. So employees at Bloomberg actually have free access to the Bloomberg terminal, little employee perk there.
And so that's a little bit what we do in engineering. So that is the core of the company there.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:56)
Great. And I love, this is going to be horrible to say, but I love hearing about tools that developers ignore.
As a developer who, as a former developer who used to love to find ways to circumvent coding standards, I want to hear a little bit more about the state of internal tooling when you joined, and why developers, including yourself, fail to embrace them across the organization.

**Luis Vega** (4:21)
So we have to dial back the clock to like 2000, maybe 17, 18, right?