Jennifer Riggins

London

Freelance Journalist at Freelance

tech culture journalist | pro writer since 2003 | 7yo mommy | ‘inimitable’ ‘force of nature’ ‘a little bit sweary’ 'the one journo I can trust' | she/her

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Articles

Introducing AiKA: Backstage Portal AI Knowledge Assistant

1 week ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

Spotify is an extreme dogfooding organization. The audio streaming company invests heavily in its own internal developer experience, proving tooling like Backstage in-house before launching to new customers and even open source contributors. Now Spotify is applying that ethos to AI-backed knowledge consolidation — and broadly sharing the challenges that go into building that.
How to Run a Generative AI Developer Tooling Experiment

2 weeks ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

How to Run a Generative AI Developer Tooling Experiment contributed, Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash Editor’s note: Jennifer Riggins created this post on behalf of DX.
Agentic AI for the Whole SDLC With Atlassian Rovo Dev Agents

3 weeks ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

ANAHEIM, CALIF. — So much of generative AI (GenAI) for engineers is focused on the inner loop, especially AI-generated code. Despite that, developers want to spend more time writing code — and AI isn’t exactly great at that (yet, anyway). What really slows down developer productivity is that outer loop, which has engineers waiting on other teams and systems. This is especially true with knowledge sharing and discovery, as poor or missing documentation continues to top developers’ complaint lists.
Formula 1: Engineering When Every Millisecond Counts

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

ANAHEIM, CALIF. — You could argue collaboration tooling company Atlassian sponsored a Formula 1 team because it wanted broader brand recognition. Or because it’s a robust metaphor for modern software engineering. While both of these are true, the sport has evolved into a feat of engineering itself, making Atlassian Williams Racing a fascinating collaboration, not just a brand deal.
Five Years In, Backstage Is Just Getting Started

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

LONDON — While Backstage has only just turned five, it really is the grown-up of the platform engineering world, having set the standard for internal developer portals. Not only in popularity but in open source community impact as well. Backstage started as an open ecosystem within the audio streaming company Spotify, where developers inner-sourced more than a hundred plugins to extend its capabilities.
Future of Platform Engineering Is About Much More Than AI

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

LONDON — “All I had to do, all I knew how to do, was write code, and then everything else that needed to be done, was done always by somebody else,” said Viktor Farcic, developer advocate at Upbound, to kick off his talk at Platform Engineering Day here.
How To Hire a Platform Engineer

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

LONDON — Many organizations are still just embarking on their platform engineering journey. That means they are deciding if and how to hire a platform engineer. Unless of course they are just making the popular mistake of retitling their DevOps engineers in order to pile more work on them. For Hazel Weakly, who built the platform engineering and infrastructure team at Datavant, you need to consider what role you are hiring for before you try to find the right person for the job.
Agentic AI and Platform Engineering: How They Can Combine

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

More than a decade after Kubernetes was introduced, and even as adoption of the container orchestrator has skyrocketed, a skills gap persists. This is a big problem for enterprises that need K8s to scale. For Sebastian Kister, Kubernetes has become the public transport for compute.
How to Build the Engineering Manager Career Path

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

Unless you work in a more traditional industry with clear staff hierarchies, it often unclear how to move up within your organization. It can be even harder to decode in the technical division, where you need to decide if you want to try your hand at being an engineering manager (EM) or to get promoted without becoming a manager — or if you follow Honeycomb co-founder Charity Majors’s advice, continue on a pendulum back and forth between technical and management roles.
How To Create the Generative AI Policy You Needed Yesterday

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Jennifer Riggins

It’s too late to ban your developers from taking advantage of generative AI. They’re already using it. And whether it’s proven or not, devs feel more productive with GenAI. After 2023 showed cautious adoption of AI, a new Sysdig survey reported a 500% growth in the number of workloads running AI and machine learning packages in 2024, with the number of GenAI packages more than doubling.