Labs: Programmable Workflows & Policy-as-Code | Ben Lloyd Pearson

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:00)
After looking at, I think, more than 4 million PRs at this point that have been processed through our platform, the thing that consistently comes up as the biggest slowdown in the software delivery process is around the code review process. So, developers write code really quickly.
Once it's been reviewed, it tends to get merged quickly. The CI-CD systems tend to be pretty good at getting deployed to production relatively fast. All the testing and everything we have, it tends to be pretty good for ensuring quality and efficiency. But there isn't really a lot of solutions out there on the market for people who are facing challenges with code reviews.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:36)
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**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:54)
Yeah, it's great to be here. It's been great energy so far at the event. I'm really looking forward to just getting through the rest of it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:00)
Yeah, we had a really fantastic opportunity to kick it off at the Dora community summit. I know we want to get into a bit about what we learned there, some of the conversations we had. It was very informative.
And one of the things that we've been hearing a lot about here is about programmable workflows, which is something that we're very passionate about. And you in particular have a lot of depth on that. You're building out the free tooling that LinearB is doing for initiating programmable workflows and applying policy as code for organizations. Can you start off by defining for the audience what programmable workflows are? And then let's dig into a bit about why they matter so much.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (2:32)
Yeah, I think what it really comes down to is giving developers the tools that they need to configure, program, design, all the sorts of automations, tooling that they need to get software from an idea to deployment into production. So, one area that's done very well in this area is CI-CD. There's a lot of tools out there. There's a lot of established practices and processes, a lot of automation. A lot of the toil that developers used to have to spend has now been sort of automated away from them, but using conventions that are very familiar to them. It's configurations, it's coding, it's stuff like that.
So, we've spent a lot of time focusing sort of earlier in the process than CI-CD. We've been promoting this idea of continuous merge, which applies more of that mentality to the code review process. So a little bit earlier upstream from the CI-CD system. And that's sort of opposed to some of the other workflows that developers might have to deal with day to day.
For example, every team has a project management software. Most developers don't really like using it. They know they have to.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:40)
I love Jira. What are you talking about?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:43)
Yeah, man, it's a beast. It can be amazing, but it terrifies developers.
It's a big context switch. So, anything you can do to make it easier for them to interact with that in a way that's more natural, that's sort of what we're proposing. And there's also a lot of interest that I've seen around regulatory and compliance as well. There's a lot of things that you sort of need to make sure your organization is following, especially if you're in a highly regulated industry, like if you're in banking or something like that, or insurance. So, I've also seen just so far at this event, there's been a real big interest in having policy as code, programmable workflows that make sure your organization is mitigating risks associated with...