What is the developer engine room?
Discover more from The Developer‘s Engine Room
What is the developer engine room?
Readers might wonder where this term “engine room” comes from and what I mean by that. In fact, it seems to be a rather old-school term, isn’t it? I used to think of steam-engines, coal-workers etc. but never rock start software development teams.
Hear me out.
When We Were Young
Well it all started in 2006 at a conference in Denmark called JAOO. I was attending the conference as a student volunteer. A great thing by the way: you got to attend almost all talks, participated in the speakers dinner and it did not cost a dime.
Now, this conference was where I met the author of “The Enterprise Integration Patterns” Gregor Hohpe, a book that I loved already as a young student.
The Software Architect Elevator
Fast forward to today 2023, Gregor Hohpe became the author even more important books such as “Cloud Strategy” and “The Software Architect Elevator”.
The latter book is where my inspiration for the Developer Engine Room originates from. There, Gregor creates the picture of the tall building with many floors. The building represents the organisation. The software architect is the one who travels across floors (departments) with two major special floors: the first is the penthouse at the very top. It represents (of cause..) top-management, often the ones most disconnected from the other “special” floor: the engine room. That’s where software is being built.
Developer Experience in the Engine Room
Gregor really wrote his entire book and many other talks around this narrative and I think it is a great analogy. So great I adopted the term “engine room” for the place (physical and organizational) that I care about the most and where I do most of my consulting work in: Co-Creating awesome development teams.
As a developer who likes to rand about bad working-conditions and fake agile process. Sometimes as architect to lead by example. Most of the time as someone in-between. Someone who actually cares about Developer Experience. This is me. Hi!
Reality check
When I look at clients in my consulting work, large corporations who are not “high performing software organisations” (will talk about this soon, too) this is what we in Germany say “Böhmische Dörfer”. Alien-Opinion that does not matter in the grand perspective of things. Let those nerds jump over the obstacles “because we always did it this way”. There is so much wrong in the engine room today, I think it needs more than the great Gregor Hohpe talking about riding the elevator.
Yes, it needs someone to ride the elevator, but it also needs a different engine room. The wasted potential drives me nuts.
That’s why I created this place here - the developer engine room: Raise awareness, give advice, speak out loud, find likeminded people.
Hope this is a good teaser of what I want to write about.
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All the best, Toni