Growing up DevProd: 5 years of improving efficiency at Stripe with Ainsley Escorce-Jones

In this episode, Rebecca chats with Ainsley Escorce-Jones, Tech Lead for the Developer Infrastructure organization at Stripe.

Rebecca and Ainsley talk about the origin stories of the Developer Infrastructure organization and the reasons Stripe invests in that area. Ainsley also shares some of his takeaways from five years focusing on developer productivity at Stripe.

Find the transcript at: https://www.unblocked.fm/episodes/ainsley-escorce-jones-stripe-growing-up-devprod

Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (00:54) Ainsley’s journey at Stripe so far (03:38) Learnings from an internship at Facebook (07:55) The origin story of the Developer Productivity org at Stripe (16:31) The right time to start a Developer Productivity organization (22:30) The monorepo vs. polyrepo strategy at Stripe (28:36) Early technology decisions and their effect on engineering work today (30:52) Experimenting with stacked pull requests (34:54) Prioritizing productivity improvement projects (41:59) The value of developer surveys (44:29) Staying in touch with the day-to-day struggles of engineers

Where to find Ainsley: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ainsej/

Where to find Rebecca: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphey/ • Twitter: https://twitter.com/rmurphey

Links and mentions • Stripe: https://stripe.com/ • Sorbet: https://sorbet.org/ • Improbable: https://www.improbable.io/ • Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com/ • VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/ • Livegrep: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep • Migrating millions of lines of code to TypeScript: https://stripe.com/blog/migrating-to-typescript • rubyfmt: https://github.com/fables-tales/rubyfmt • Stacked pull requests: https://matt-rickard.com/stacked-pull-requests