Developer Productivity Masterclass: Interview With Leonid Blouvshtein

On December 7th, Lightrun will host a free master class with Mykyta Protsenko, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix; Michael Wood, Field CTO, HashiCorp; Ryan Menezez, Software Engineering Manager, Meta; and Leonid Blouvshtein, CTO of Lightrun.

I got a chance to grab Leonid and make him sit down for this quick interview...

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself?

I've worked in several successful startups while most of my experience is with distributed systems that require high performance. This was after I graduated from the elite 8200 intelligence unit of the IDF.

I sold my first startup at the age of 22. I founded Lightrun a couple of years ago to revolutionize the way developers interact with cloud production applications.

Q: What would be the chief topics you’ll discuss in the master class?

I want to focus on the following topics:

• Developer Productivity at Different Growth Stages.
• The importance for the developers to embrace the DevOps culture and adopt observability in the development workflow.

In the past decade, the way we build and deploy software has changed completely. We moved from on-prem deployments to VMs in the cloud to container-based environments. With the rapid change in the ops world, companies also changed their methodologies.

A lot of ownership is moving towards the developers and developers nowadays need different tooling and processes than what they needed 5 years ago, and organizations should adopt this change.

Q: Aren’t the problems startups run into different from the problems in major companies like Meta and Netflix?

Yes, and no.

The scale of Netflix or Meta requires a level of scale that brings with it challenges we all hope to face. But probably won’t in the short term. But there’s still a lot of common ground we can build thanks to the componentized nature of the market and shifting story of tooling.

Mistakes you make today in the core team building the MVP can bite you back when you try to scale. The technical debt we incur today can become the source of long-running problems. A small investment in doing things "right" at this stage can make a big difference in the future.

Q: What excites you about this master class?

I’m very excited about the panel we've brought together. Netflix, Hashicorp, and Meta are three titans of the industry. Mykyta, Ryan, and Michael have a lot of experience with high scale fast-growing systems and engineering organizations. I think the panel will provide us with a lot of insights into the different approaches, but even more interesting is the consensus we can reach.

I think through consensus we can uncover underlying truths of developing that might be less obvious.

Join Us

Thanks Leonid for this great insight. Please join us on Tuesday, December 7th for this master class to learn more.