Quantifying Tech Debt with Jack McCloy from Snowflake

About Jack McCloy, Engineering Manager at Snowflake:

Jack is an Engineering Leader, angel investor, and startup advisor. He currently works at Snowflake where he leads the UI Platform team. Prior to joining Snowflake he built and led the Product Engineering Infrastructure team at Amplitude. As an angel investor and advisor he focuses on DevTools, Infrastructure, Data, and Design Tools. He lives in San Francisco with his partner and their 1 year old daughter.

Jack on LinkedIn and Twitter‍

References

Job listing: https://careers.snowflake.com/us/en/

For measuring code complexity: ESLint's code here

Madge to identify circular dependencies:

madge --circular /path/to/dir

Chapters‍

00:00 Introduction and Product Engineering Infrastructure
08:18 Understanding Tech Debt
15:03 Measuring tech debt
24:17 Getting buy-in from leadership for tech debt
29:58 Rapid fire questions

Summary‍

In this episode, Jack McCloy, engineering manager at Snowflake, discusses the concept of product engineering infrastructure. He explains that product engineering infrastructure refers to the unique pieces of infrastructure that enable product teams to move fast and build better. Jack also covers measuring and quantifying tech debt, and how teams can de-risk it to make projects progress faster.‍

Keywords‍

Product engineering infrastructure, developer experience, developer environments, build tooling, design systems, component libraries.‍

Takeaways

• Product engineering infrastructure enables product teams to move fast and build better.
• Developer environments, build tooling, design systems, and component libraries are key components of product engineering infrastructure.
• Companies like Vercel provide product infrastructure as a service.
• Internal projects and teams within companies also work on building their own infrastructure. Snowflake has a dedicated developer experience team that focuses on enhancing the developer experience for Java and C++ developers.
• The team consists of eight engineers, designers, and a product manager.
• They work on creating tooling and applications that improve the developer experience, including the frontend for Snowflake's core data warehouse.
• The team also owns the design system, which helps maintain consistency and efficiency in the development process. Product engineering and UI infrastructure play a crucial role in roadmap planning.
• The developer experience org combines efforts with product engineering and UI infrastructure.
• Measuring impact and using KPIs are important in product engineering infrastructure.