Developer Productivity Engineering Meetup at Meta Eng office in Palo Alto

The SV Productivity Engineering meetup team are hosting our next in-person meetup of 2025 at the Meta Engineering HQ in Palo Alto sponsored by Gradle, Meta, and Netflix.

****EXTERNAL RSVP IS REQUIRED FOR ENTRY*****
RSVP HERE: https://dpe.org/dpe-palo-alto-tour-2025/

Join us for a four hour event focused on Developer Productivity Engineering and Developer Experience at Meta SF engineering offices with talks from Gradle, Meta, Microsoft, and Uber.

AGENDA
2 pm - 3pm - Networking and Socializing

3:00 pm - 3:20 pm
How better Project Management improved Developer Workflows at Meta
Nivedita Chopra, Software Engineering Manager, Meta

3:30 pm - 3:50 pm
The Crushing Weight of Time: A Developer Productivity Story
Brian Houck, Sr. Principal Applied Scientist, Microsoft

BREAK

4:10 pm - 4:30 pm
Merging Large-Scale Software Changes while Maintaining a Green Mainline
Dhruva Juloori, Senior Software Engineer, Uber

4:40 pm - 5:00 pm
Are Your Tests Slowing You Down
Trisha Gee, Lead Technical Evangelist, Gradle

5 pm - 6pm - Networking and Socializing

TALK #1
How better Project Management improved Developer Workflows at Meta
Nivedita Chopra, Software Engineering Manager, Meta

Until as recently as 2019, engineering teams at Meta had been struggling with project management as they didn’t have one recommended tool, and instead used 40+ different tools that were not integrated with the rest of the developer workflow. In this talk, we will share the details of these challenges, how a solution was designed to solve them, and the impact the new internal product (GSD – Get Stuff Done-) has had on developer productivity.

TALK #2
The Crushing Weight of Time: A Developer Productivity Story
Brian Houck, Sr. Principal Applied Scientist, Microsoft

Software Engineering is about so much more than just coding. Developers juggle countless tasks, yet their actual workweeks rarely align with how they’d like to spend their time. This mismatch can lead to frustration, inefficiency, and burnout. In this talk, I’ll reveal findings from multiple large-scale studies on developer workflows, productivity peaks, and the impact of misaligned priorities. We’ll explore how time fragmentation, low-value tasks, and automation gaps shape the developer experience (and what organizations can do to fix it). From protecting focus time to leveraging AI for toil reduction, this session will provide actionable insights to help developers reclaim their time and maximize impact.

TALK #3

Merging Large-Scale Software Changes while Maintaining a Green Mainline
Dhruva Juloori, Senior Software Engineer, Uber

At Uber’s scale, guaranteeing an always-green mainline while processing hundreds of changes per hour across diverse monorepos presented a significant challenge. In this talk, I’ll explore the design and evolution of MergeQueue—Uber’s innovative scheduling system that ensures mainline stability and production readiness for every commit. By harnessing speculative validation, build-time and change success predictions, and advanced conflict resolution strategies, MergeQueue delivers unmatched efficiency. It has reduced CI resource usage by approximately 53%, CPU usage by 44%, and P95 waiting times by 37%. These optimizations not only eliminate CI bottlenecks but also enable thousands of engineers to ship code rapidly and reliably, ensuring every commit is production-ready.

Talk #4
Are Your Tests Slowing You Down
Trisha Gee, Lead Technical Evangelist, Gradle

Testing is a Good Thing, right? Especially automated testing. But “Good things come to those who wait” is not something that’s going to appeal to the busy developer. You want results, and you want them now. You’re in The Zone working on a problem, and the last thing you want is to break your flow wrestling with your testing framework or waiting for the tests to finish running.

More code means more tests. More coverage means more tests. More tests mean more time. Time that you want to spend being productive, creative, innovative. How can you balance the need for quality with the need for speed?

In this talk, Trisha will identify issues that slow down developers when writing, running and debugging tests, and look at tools that can help developers with each of these problems. There will be live coding, analysis of social media poll results, an overview of solutions in this space, “best practice” recommendations, and machine learning will be mentioned at some point.