Are You Pre-Pandemic Productive Yet?

As someone who has worked remotely for the majority of the past decade, I’m certainly not the case study for productivity and last year’s sudden introduction to remote work, but when I saw the first headline about dev productivity being back to pre-pandemic levels, I had to wonder: did they get this right?

According to the Infoworld article leading with said headline, developer productivity is returning to pre-pandemic levels, but the workplace itself is shifting, GitHub has revealed in recent research.

The recent research being cited, of course, is GitHub’s yearly encapsulation of all things developer, The State of the Octoverse, which it released last week, with data from more than 12,000 respondents and 4 million repositories. Now, there are insights aplenty, from language popularity to the benefits of documenting your code and more, but it was this productivity thing that really caught my attention. Heck, how could it not? It’s the lead of the results:

“Last year, our approach to remote work reflected a lack of familiarity. We were juggling competing needs in our personal lives and at work, while trying to maintain the same levels of productivity before the pandemic,” GitHub writes at the very top of this year’s Octoverse report. “During 2021, we’ve begun to evolve from merely compensating while hoping for a return to the ‘old normal’ to truly metamorphosing our processes with the awareness of remote work needs.”

There’s just a handful of nits I want to pick here, starting off with this “lack of familiarity” as the reason for an unproductive 2020, and ending with the idea that it was “metamorphosing our processes with the awareness of remote work needs” that brought back said productivity.

Date idea: going through each other's GitHub issues one by one and asking if you'll *really* ever address them or if you should just close them

— Sy Brand (@TartanLlama) November 12, 2021

As I mentioned previously, remote work, for me, is nothing new at all, and yet, I would say my productivity was also down last year. My ability to focus, my ability to stay on task, my ability to put together a full thought — all of these things constantly interrupted with… where do we start?

As evidence, I offer last year’s column from March 14, 2020, regarding working from home when the world is ending.

If you ask only questions about process and automation, those will be the only answers you will get. There is no amount of process or automation that can account for the constant concern for the health and wellness of yourself and everyone you know. There is no process for children who are suddenly home all day every day with nothing to do. Automation can’t touch your inability to look away from what feels like the world ending, one Tweet at a time.

I would venture that perhaps in addition to “metamorphosing” processes and becoming “familiar”, there are a variety of reasons outside the scope of the Octoverse that might contribute to a return to “productivity” for developers.

All that aside, there is also this rather hilarious take on this year’s Octoverse regarding how developers feel regarding reusing code versus designing code for reuse — I encourage you to click on through for the perfect punchline.

In Github's survey, ~40% of devs expect to work 100% remote after the pandemic https://t.co/nZXJ9G0De0

There's no going back, and companies that insist in forcing people to be at the office will have lots of trouble hiring (and retaining) good developers

— Belén 😱 (@ladybenko) November 18, 2021

This Week in Programming

• Finding Your Favorite Visual Studio Extensions: Last week, we looked at the release of Visual Studio 2022, and this week Microsoft is following that up with a little guide on how to find your favorite extensions in Visual Studio 2022. Long story short, some have been migrated, some are yet to be published on the VS Marketplace, some others have been renamed, and others still have even been built directly into Visual Studio 2022 directly. For example, Dotfuscator Community is included in VS 2022 as an optional component that you can install, while the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio functionality has been included by default. Others still are simply still in the process of being rebuilt and migrated over to Visual Studio 2022. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, head on over to the blog post for a bit of guidance.

Docker: Go developers, you're number one!
Kubernetes: Put in a ticket.

— Darren Shepherd (@ibuildthecloud) November 16, 2021

• .NET 6 Makes Its Way to AWS, RHEL, OpenShift: One further update to last week’s news from Microsoft, which also released .NET 6 alongside Visual Studio 2022, is the addition of .NET 6 on AWS, as well as on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenShift. AWS offers a guide to the most up-to-date status on .NET 6 support alongside a .NET Developer Center, while Red Hat has installation instructions, and points users to its .NET overview and more .NET resources on Red Hat Developer.
• Kotlin 1.6.0 Arrives: That’s right, the next version of your favorite Java alternative is here with Kotlin 1.6.0, which introduces “Stable exhaustive whens, Kover, and a new memory manager for Kotlin/Native.” JetBrains offers all the details in a release blog post that details new language features, optimized delegated properties and repeatable annotations in Kotlin/JVM, a preview of a new memory model and more in Kotlin/Native, and code coverage plugin Kover. Of course, if you don’t feel like reading, you could always just check out the video below:

• Docker Opens Up Business Tier: Earlier this year, Docker changed things up regarding Docker Desktop, requiring companies with more than 250 employees or $10M in annual revenue to pay for a subscription. With the move-over date of Jan. 31 approaching, the company says it has heard from users that they want to be able to get a Docker Business subscription without going through the entire purchase order process or committing to the 50 seat minimum requirement. In response, Docker has started to offer what it calls an easier way to get started with Docker Business, which will allow users to purchase a minimum of five seats via credit/debit card rather than dealing with the more extensive process previously required. Meanwhile, if you’re not sure what plan is best, Docker says it has also created a cheat sheet on how to select the Docker Subscription that’s right for you. Who knew figuring out how to pay someone could be so hard?

I've been programming for 22 years and I don't know what dependency injection is

— Paul Biggar 🇵🇸🇮🇪 (@paulbiggar) November 16, 2021