Automate and elevate: Boosting developer productivity with AI | Nerea Leguinazabal

Thank you! As Dan was saying, we're going to talk about Copilot and GitHub. How can you boost your productivity using Copilot? The first thing I want to ask is who is using Copilot here? Any hands? Oh, so many. Okay. I want to understand this because later I'll do some demo and explain the basics a bit. A bit of an introduction for the people that have never used Copilot. Then we'll go into things I like more and the most interesting parts.

The first thing. I'm sure you've seen this slide. I'm sure you're feeling it. We did a study a couple years ago where we discovered that 75 percent of the time developers are not actually developing. They're planning or refactoring, doing stuff that's maybe a bit boring or less productive. I'm sure you've felt that and that you want to spend more time doing what's interesting to you, right? Why does this happen? You see a bunch of things here. Sometimes it's because you have legacy code or complex databases. You have to do repetitive tasks. Maybe create some unit testing. We're also onboarded in a bunch of repos. We may not know what they're about and we have to onboard super fast, which is very hard to do. We may just need to reuse code or follow some frameworks that we're not familiar with, right?

How does Copilot help with this? Hopefully, if you've used Copilot, you've seen that it maximizes your happiness. This is what we're going to try to show later. How does it happen? The first thing would be increasing your productivity. How does this translate into real things? This is a bit abstract what I'm talking about. First of all, it solves some of the challenges we were talking about earlier. I'm onboarded in a new project. Maybe I'm not familiar with a framework. I use it a lot to learn new languages, new frameworks and new models that I want to develop. Other things that it can help you with. It can help you focus on the things that are more interesting. I don't know. Things like creating data for your test or refactoring stuff. That's not really something that brings value sometimes. That's what Copilot is going to help you with. That's what it's helping me with. That's what we say when we talk about productivity.

Finally, it's going to accelerate software development. You'll see if you've already started using Copilot that you develop ten times or 20 times faster instead of going to the documentation and trying to figure out how things work. You'll be like 'just tell me how it works and give me some examples, some GitHub code, so I can start from somewhere.' This brings us acceleration and innovation way faster than it could if we were only doing it ourselves. Something you've already experienced is you'll have more time to do the interesting stuff. I like to say you won't spend time doing mundane tasks like unit testing, documenting, summarizing stuff, and trying to understand the code and search the documentation. All those things are repetitive. We don't want to spend time doing them. It's that 75 percent of time we spend trying to do things for the other 25 percent, which is actually coding. That will be out of the question, and we'll spend more time talking to our teammates, brainstorming and trying to understand the design we want to do. It's a bunch of other things that are not only bringing value to the business but also to ourselves, because it's where we actually enjoy spending our time.

Where is this whole thing? Most likely you're using different IDEs, platforms et cetera. As you can see, today we are in your favorite IDEs, hopefully. We are in Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio and the whole family of JetBrains. We recently added Xcode and more recently, maybe a couple of weeks ago, we added Eclipse. Yay, Eclipse. Sometimes people use Eclipse. It's a bit old-ish, but we still added it, because it's very useful for some business cases.