#41 Winning Over Application Developers: Agency not Autonomy - Interview w/ Jessitron (AKA Jessica Kerr)

Provided as a free resource by DataStax https://www.datastax.com/products/datastax-astra?utm_source=DataMeshRadio (AstraDB) https://www.patreon.com/datameshradio (Patreon) Transcript for this episode (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HwzX5uyqH-B5Wm6QotiZDnpsKWmLnQdGOF_r1nBqnew/edit (link)) provided by Starburst. See their Data Mesh Summit recordings https://www.starburst.io/learn/events-webinars/datanova?datameshradio (here) (info gated) In this episode, Scott interviewed Jessica Kerr more widely known as Jessitron who is a Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb.io. Or as many affectionally refer to her, the Empress of Software. You're probably gonna enjoy this one :) Scott asked Jessitron on because she had a very pithy tweet about data mesh being "conscious design for unexpected use" and because she knows the developer mindset extremely well and many folks are having trouble working with the developers to get them bought in to sharing their data well. Jessitron started off by discussing one of the big issues with application development: despite the tooling and process advancements of the last 20 years, it's all somehow only made application development harder. So the starting advice is don't just add more to their plate. It probably won't go well! Her biggest point was giving application developers agency in how they share their data is key. Autonomy is just passing the responsibility over without the help. Application developers want guidance/direction to the target outcome, but they want to make the choices on how to achieve said target outcome while being given the resources to do so. The information and capability to do their job is key. For driving buy-in, start with the why, not the ask. Let them know why their data is valuable. And BE SPECIFIC! The conversation should be about their potential impact, not just the negative of "you changed this and it broke" but the aspirational. You want them to start thinking about how can you work together to enable them to share their data in a high conte