The COVID-19 pandemic has made applications essential for businesses to maintain connectivity, operations and services, and this has accelerated the need for faster developer speed.

For developers to cope with this high demand and still maintain creativity, automation is key, according to Dana Lawson (pictured), vice president of engineering at GitHub Inc., an open-source code repository and Microsoft subsidiary.

“We’re seeing developers work more, but we’re seeing the work more on open-source projects and the things that they want to work on,” she said. “It’s that continuation of ‘hey, instead of automation being an afterthought, we’re going to make it something that is at the forethought of what we’re doing.’”

Lawson spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during DockerCon. They discussed the role of modern app developers, the growing importance of automation, the prospects for the community and the rise of open source. (* Disclosure below.)

The first step is to understand workflows

Before automating some of their processes, developers need to understand their workflows and how they are spending their time, according to Lawson. This means that there is no one size fits all workflow, but a configuration that depends on the needs of each team.

“If you’ve done the same repeatable thing over every day, numerous days, you probably should just go spend the time to automate that, and I think it’s a convincing point,” she said.

The automation process involves taking a step back and building something repeatable that developers can speed up again.

“You’re giving that time back, and that time is mental capacity, mental capacity that can be applied to something that’s more important,” Lawson stated.

By freeing up developers’ time, which was previously occupied with repetitive tasks, automation gives them the chance to focus on more creative missions to solve the problems of business and society.

“We want every person that builds to be an innovator and not just an innovator for innovation sake, but because they’re changing and affecting somebody’s life,” Lawson said. “And so, when we dig deep and focuse on the craft and we still have expertise, we’re just going to be applying that in a very intentional way, versus ‘OK, hurry up, build, build, build, hurry up.’”

While there is sometimes a fear that automation systems and interconnected tools may be taking someone’s job, it is not true, she said, because “what we’re doing is saying ‘take the repeatable things that you’re doing over and over and over and let’s focus on that craft.”

Observability in the DevOps culture

In addition to automation, another important feature for the developer environment is observability. The subject has gained more attention with the modernization of companies’ IT infrastructure, with native cloud applications, containers and Kubernetes, which have added several layers of complexity to the system.

Observability is not at the end of the stack, but a part of it, according to Lawson. She wants developer teams to “be their own little micro-operating system, where they have all the resources available for them to go and do the thing that they are intending to do and not have to worry about that subset.”

Therefore, observability must be built on a layer of abstraction, and developers must understand why this is important.

“We’re just seeing this continuation of monitoring DevOps, SRE; it’s not a problem, it’s a culture,” she said. “It’s not one person’s job or a role; it’s a part of how you build great software. It’s just a practice.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon. (* Disclosure: Docker Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Docker nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE