Criteo DevX Days: why and how we organized an internal conference to improve the Developer Experience
This is the first article in a series where we will release selected content from our in-house conference. Follow this publication for not missing any of the following articles.
In 2021, Criteo launched several initiatives to “shift” its business strategy. The company invested a lot to complete its portfolio with new products to fulfill marketers’ and media owners’ needs. At the end of the year, the company had successfully bootstrapped these changes across all departments: sales, marketing, legal, operations, and R&D, of course! The product roadmap was ambitious, and R&D teams were under pressure to transform the portfolio as fast as possible to build the future Commerce Media Platform.
To successfully execute this business strategy, R&D leaders identified three priorities to reach our 2022 goals:
- Staffing: Attract top-notch and diverse talents to grow R&D
- Simplification: Simplify our functional and technical stacks
- Dev XP: Improve Developer Experience
Developer experience had been identified as a priority because we knew it was a requirement to sustain our product strategy and our attractiveness as a tech company that aims at hiring the best engineers.
Actually, “Developer Experience” and “Engineering Team Efficiency” were gaining more and more interest from the community and the industry. The adoption of DORA metrics and the growth of remote development environments (Codespaces, gitpod.io, etc.) were symptoms of this global trend.
However, Developer Experience is a wide concept that covers multiple aspects. It’s not only the tools developers are working with. It’s also the daily experiences with the process, cognitive(mental) workload, collaboration, etc. All the facets of Developer Experience must be considered if you want to improve it. The SPACE framework has been really helpful for us.
Through our journey, we learned a lot about the issues slowing down developers’ daily lives. One of the most difficult problems we faced was how to make people know. Whether newcomers or old-timers, they were unaware of the best practices, how to do some basic things, or the latest features that would make their life easier. Obviously, writing and maintaining a knowledge base help solve the issue, but it is sometimes difficult for developers to read all the documentation they have been provided.
This was when we decided to organize an internal conference focused on developer experience: the Criteo DevX Days.
Why organize a conference? Well, we think it’s a good medium to share knowledge with a huge audience of developers. People go to conferences because they like learning things through talks and networking. More, the information shared is usually pretty packed, and you learn a lot in a short matter of time. It was totally appropriate for our goal: improving developer experience by expanding their knowledge around development best practices and tooling.
We had a second hidden goal behind the organization of the conference: creating a knowledge base with the slides and the recordings of the presentations so that anyone could refer to them in the future. It is particularly true and useful for newcomers.
Now let me share with you some details about the event’s organisation. It might be helpful for you if you want to reproduce it in your company or community.
Finding speakers
You can find external speakers, but they won’t be as good as the internal developers. Your senior developers have an irreplaceable knowledge of your development environment. They know the capabilities and limits of your platform. They know the golden paths that will deliver maintainable code to production in an efficient way. Leverage their experience!
At Criteo, we organized a call for speakers with a very short deadline (less than two months). We didn’t know if people would volunteer to make a talk or if we would have to cancel the event due to the lack of speakers. We haven’t been disappointed. For the first edition, we received 40 talks! That was beyond our expectations.
We completed the program by inviting an external speaker from Google who shared how software development is made at Google. Unfortunately, no secret sauce has been revealed 😀 , but we’ve been able to compare ourselves to a leader in tech.
Tuning for your audience
Getting 40 talks is great, but you can imagine that the content is very different from one presentation to another. We decided to split them into two categories:
Discover sessions
- The goal was to discover a concept, an application, a way to do something “simple”.
- Audience: developers with no prior knowledge of the topic.
- Duration: 30 minutes
In-depth sessions
- The goal was to present something new or “advanced” to reinforce the audience’s knowledge.
- Audience: developers with experience in the domain. They are familiar with the topic or application and want to know more.
- Duration: 50 minutes
Splitting the presentations into two groups offered us several advantages.
First, it became easier for developers to select the presentations they would like to attend. Nothing is worse than going to a talk where you’re not the targeted audience. You don’t learn anything because it’s too simple or too complex.
Second, we’ve been able to run two tracks in parallel, limiting the time booked in people’s calendars. Actually, some of our offices are separated by an ocean, a sea, and an 8-hour time difference. Each day, we had only three working hours in common. Packing the presentations in those 3 hours by having two tracks in parallel was really helpful.
Planning
The talks were spread over four afternoons in Europe (= 4 mornings in the US). The most challenging thing was to find the best week to organize this event between the quarterly OKR sessions, the preparation of the End-of-Year sales period (Black Friday, CyberWeek, etc.), and the Christmas holidays. We finally ended up with the “release freeze period”, a.k.a Black Friday week, where the pressure to deliver everything cools down since you can’t release it to production. Retrospectively speaking, it was a “good-but-not-perfect” choice because our US office was closed for Thanksgiving, the last day of the conference.
Socializing
At the beginning of 2022, Criteo implemented its Flexible Work policy. It means that Criteos are given a choice to work from home or at the office. It would have been easier to organize a virtual-remote-only event, but we were convinced that socializing is an important part of a successful conference. We then decided to offer the opportunity for people to attend the talks in meeting rooms. We thought it would be easier for them to ask questions and engage in discussion with the speaker. Honestly, it was a failure 😅 except for the keynote, where people physically attended the talk. People preferred to attend the conference remotely, and they were totally fine with that.
We concluded the event with a cocktail, and surprisingly (or not), people came to share a drink and their thoughts about the presentations they had attended.
What’s next?
We were organizing the Criteo DevX Days for the first time. Our goal was to share the knowledge and experience that could improve the overall developer experience. Even if we had some doubts at the beginning, we could definitely say now, that it was a real success. All the speakers were fully engaged, and the content they created was often on-par with the talks you hear at conferences. Thanks to them, we created an amazing knowledge base that all Criteos can refer to when they need to.
We also received lots of positive feedback from the people who attended the talks, which definitely encourages us to make it again next year. If you haven’t done it before in your company, do not hesitate. You will never regret it because it’s an exciting adventure and you will feel deeply satisfied to have supported people in their developers’ daily life.
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