 Hi, this is your host of Nipartia and welcome to the 2023 Predictions series. And today we have with us Rob Schmidt, partner at Karik Group. Rob is great to have you on the show. Great to be here. Before I ask you to grab your crystal ball and share some of the predictions that you have for us, tell us a bit about the company itself. I'm a partner at Karik Group LLC and we are a partner for many enterprises in organizations that are looking to transform their developer experience, their platform engineering and basically build a better product for their customers. So that's what customers turned to us to help them do. Now it's time for you to grab your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you have for us. My first prediction I think is more going to be aligned to what we have seen happen in the marketplace over the past few months where we've seen a lot of hiring get cut, we've seen layoffs in a number of firms. And what that means to us, or at least what we see as a trend going into 2023 here, is that companies and organizations are going to have to get used to getting more out of their people and getting more productivity out of their developers in order to meet their goals. So they're not going to be in this place where they can really throw people or bodies at problems like they've been able to in the past. So there's going to be a lot more focus on how do we make these people successful? What can we do to get more out of them? How do we make their jobs less friction, more frictionless so that they're not spending time mired and muck and doing things that clog the wheels and slow down the path to production? So that's going to be, I think, a fairly large focus for a lot of companies in 2023. My second prediction is more along the lines of what we see in the platform engineering space. I see platform engineering has kind of been around for a long time and we've seen a lot of companies really start to adopt it, but really they've been adopting a kind of piecemeal where you have platform engineers that are owning portions of the tool chain or the developer experience, rather than thinking about the whole thing as an end-to-end experience. So what we're really going to see this year is more of a product mindset brought to the platform engineering where you're going to be a lot more focused on the developer experience and going out and talking and designing what those things are going to be rather than providing tools that allow developers to consume components of the cloud or on-prem infrastructure or whatever you're developing on. They're going to be thinking about this holistically of like, how do I make it easy for these primitives to be consumed by these developers without them having to spend a lot of time learning, adjusting or rebuilding or retuning their skill sets to new areas or to new products, right? And then lastly, my third prediction I would say is we've seen kind of or even just in the past few weeks with chat GPT, the impact that AI is actually starting to have on the developer experience. For now, it's been mostly focused on things like cogeneration, right? Like GitHub co-pilot and what we're seeing. What we're going to see starting in 2023 is AI become a lot more augmentative to the developer experience. You're going to see it move into different areas of the developer tool chain where developers will use it to automatically generate tests, right? Or it will start doing tech debt analysis or it will start looking for reliability issues inside of your logs, right? Kind of on an automated way where it's reporting information back to you and looking for those patterns and helping make it easier on, again, the developer lifecycle and everything that they're doing is part of their jobs. So augmenting them, allowing them to do more, right? To build more faster rather than being kind of generative as it is right now where it's just like it spits code out and goes from there. Thanks for sharing those predictions. Now, if I ask you what is going to be the focus of Get It Group in 2023? For 2023, we're really focused on helping developers manage these transitions whether it's standing up a platform engineering team and working on figuring out how we're going to integrate all of these various tool sets, containers, serverless, CICD, all of the kind of storage patterns, all that kind of stuff together into a unified platform, kind of the original intent of Kubernetes as it were. Here's the thing that you can use to build your own developer platform, your own opinionated developer platform. We're going to be very focused on that. We're also going to be focused on the programs and the practices that developers use in their day-to-day lives as they are trying to provide the software to their companies. We're going to focus on what are the things that are causing them issues, where are they spending their time, helping them understand where they're at in their company and what their software provides and then helping them make value-based decisions around what are the things that we want to control and what are the things we don't want to control. We've definitely seen teams go really far down the stack on DevOps, where almost now you have two pizza teams kind of owning a lot of stuff. The secret sauce to DevOps is to own less stuff. We're working with companies to help them figure that out now as well. Those are going to probably be our two large focuses for next year. But you never know what the future holds. What are the big challenges that you see will be there in 2023 and also if you can talk about what role category will play to help customers navigate through those challenges? One of the biggest problems that we've seen, one of the biggest challenges that companies have is that they've gotten to this point. They've gotten whether they're a digital native or they're a traditional enterprise that's been around for 100 plus years. They've all gotten to this point for a reason. Oftentimes, these businesses are so large and so disparate that they're really not connected to each other or the businesses necessarily connected to IT. When you start to embark on these large transformations like digital transformation or platform engineering or DevOps or even implementing Agile or something like that, it becomes very difficult for companies to scale because all these teams are operating in different contexts. They're operating in different modalities, with different tech stacks, with different tech debt, with different approaches and different constraints on their business. So helping folks do that in a reliable and repeatable way is something that we're focused on executing on with our partners. Rob, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course share these predictions, focus on the challenges ahead. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show and discuss other topics as well. But I really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Of course. Thank you for the time. Appreciate it.