Amanda Silver on What's Coming for Developers - Episode 151

Joining the podcast this week is Amanda Silver! Amanda is the Corporate Vice President (CVP) of Product for Microsoft's Developer Division which includes the Visual Studio family of products, .NET, TypeScript, and Azure developer platforms. She has been key to Microsoft's transformation to contribute to open source with the introduction of TypeScript, Visual Studio Code, and the acquisition of both Xamarin and GitHub. She believes that a tight digital feedback loop with zero distance between end-users and engineering teams is a critical element of great product development.

In this episode, Amanda discusses what's coming next for senior and junior developers alike. She shares her experiences on Microsoft's Developer Division; what developers can look forward to regarding Visual Studio 2022, Azure PaaS, GitHub Codespaces, Visual Studio Code, and more. She also speaks about what the industry as a whole can do to improve developer and user satisfaction, attract more potential developers to the field, and how we can make education more accessible. Amanda has invaluable insights on many different topics that you'll want to tune in for!

"We need to talk to our customers [and] the people we aspire to be our customers every single day — that's the only way that we can make sure that we're building products that people love and use." — Amanda Silver

Topics of Discussion:

[:14] About The Azure DevOps Podcast, Clear Measure, the new podcast Architect Tips, and Jeffrey's offer to speak at virtual user groups.

[1:18] About today's episode with Amanda Silver.

[2:00] Jeffrey welcomes Amanda to the podcast!

[2:08] Amanda speaks about her career journey thus far and what has led her to her current position at Microsoft.

[5:21] How Amanda's team is organized at Microsoft, the work that they do, and the practices they engage in with their users.

[9:37] Amanda shares her thoughts on the importance of developers, how developers can become more effective in their roles, what the industry can do to attract more people into the field, and more.

[12:29] How the industry is helping developers enter the industry quicker and what can be improved on in the industry to lower the barrier to entry.

[16:30] About the upcoming release of Visual Studio and the recent preview.

[18:57] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast's sponsor: Clear Measure.

[19:29] Amanda describes machine learning and AI and how it can help developers.

[22:33] Static analysis vs. probabilistic analysis.

[26:09] Amanda describes the vision for Visual Studio Code.

[30:02] Has Visual Studio Code become the most popular coding text editor?

[30:58] There is a lot of Visual Studio Code in GitHub Codespaces. Amanda explains how these products fit together.

[35:12] About the current work Microsoft is doing regarding Azure PaaS services and the changes that developers can look forward to in the future.

[37:24] Are containers the future?

[38:32] About Azure Arc, how it is designed, and what this means.

[39:18] Jeffrey thanks Amanda Silver for joining the podcast.