Speaker
Abstract
Developer satisfaction, developer joy, and business results are strongly correlated. Developer productivity frameworks like SPACE recognize this, with Satisfaction being a key metric. And yet - our jobs are frustrating, filled with mindless work, and free of joy. How do we fix that? Is annoying waste inevitable? Can developer performance be tuned? Are productivity measurements helping or hurting us? And how can you persuade management to invest in boredom?
Except... it's not the boss we need to convince. Sometimes, it's ourselves. We're so in the habit of running to meet deadlines, running from one problem to the next, of aiming for 100% efficiency, we're the first ones to say "I don't have time for fun". In this talk, Holly and Trisha will try to convince you that fun isn't a luxury, but a necessity.
Holly is an expert on play at work, unwise automations, and polar bears. Trisha is an expert on performance tuning, tooling and productivity. Come to this talk to find out what these topics have in common.
Interview
Trisha: I'm a developer advocate for Gradle and my focus is on talking about Developer Productivity - what it is, what it is NOT, and some ways of measuring it. At Gradle, our focus is on Developer Productivity for the developer themselves, and how being productive brings you joy.
Trisha: Holly talks about creativity and fun in development, and I talk about developer joy in the context of productivity, so we decided it would be fun (see what I did there?) to do a presentation together about how including joy and fun in the day job is important to make us better at our work.
Trisha: Developers of all levels, and engineering leadership
Trisha: An understanding that developers are not code-producing machines, but humans, and that humans work better with less of a focus on "efficiently" squeezing more out of them and more of a focus on making space for creativity.
Trisha: I would love to think that with better tooling, better languages, and with things like AI doing all the boring stuff, that we'll learn that the human, messy creative side of software development is the most important part.
Trisha: I attended QCon London in 2007 and it had a PROFOUND impact on my career. Back then, I was a mid-level consultant working at an investment bank. At QCon, I learnt about BDD (from Dan North), Selenium (from Erik Doernenburg), and a lot of stuff about agile. I watched talks on the Java track, which was hosted by Simon Brown (a colleague of mine at the time), and I learnt I could be doing a lot more with the language. QCon opened my eyes to how software development could (should) be, and it also inspired me to start blogging. It helped me become a much better developer, and ultimately led me on the path of becoming a developer advocate 6 years later.
Topics
QCon London 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Engineering Productivity and Developer Experience Hosted by Blanca Rojo Executive Director, Distinguished Engineer and Cloud Engineer @UBSFrom the same track
Monday 7 April
10:35 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session developer productivity Productivity Is Messing Around and Having Fun Holly Cummins, Trisha Gee Developer satisfaction, developer joy, and business results are strongly correlated. Developer productivity frameworks like SPACE recognize this, with Satisfaction being a key metric. And yet - our jobs are frustrating, filled with mindless work, and free of joy. How do we fix that? 11:45 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session pair programming Continuous Delivery Is Not Possible Without Pair Programming: Lessons From SpareBank 1 and SINTEF in Norway Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom, Ola Hast In the autumn of 2021, SpareBank 1, one of the largest savings banks in Norway, decided to take a new direction by significantly increasing how often we deployed to production, going from daily to hourly frequency. 13:35 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session Platform Engineering Achieve Optimal Efficiency for your Developer Experience Teams Fabien Deshayes Engineering Manager - Platform & Developer Experience @Monzo, Previously @Spotify Developer Experience teams are quite popular these days as organisations understand the value of optimising for developers productivity. 14:45 Fleming (3rd Fl.) Session Coding From Autocomplete to Agents: AI Coding State of Play Birgitta Böckeler Global Lead for AI-assisted Software Delivery @Thoughtworks, Software Developer, Architect, and Technical Leader, 20 Years Experience in Technology After almost 2 years of intense attention givent to coding assistants, at the beginning of 2025, many organizations were disappointed by the measurable results. The recent arrival of coding assistance agents though has stirred up and reset expectations and the hype. 15:55 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session Your Platform is Not an Island: Embracing Evolution in Your Ecosystem Rachael Wonnacott Associate Director for Container Platform Engineering @Fidelity International As with most forms of engineering it is easy to talk about theory in the abstract, but typically more nuanced to implement. Platform engineering is no exception. While the term has become increasingly popular over the last few years, it is a concept that is organically evolving within industry. 17:05 Rutherford (4th Fl.) Unconference Unconference: Engineering Productivity and Developer Experience