Optimizing for Time: Dark Matter

Presented by Karim Nakad (Meta) at DPE Summit 2025, an event developed and hosted by Gradle. Visit https://gradle.com/solutions/generative-ai/?utm_campaign=dpe-summit-2025&utm_medium=social-organic&utm_source=youtube&utm_content=optimizing-for-time-dark-matter-main to learn how to reap the rewards of AI in today's software development landscape while avoiding the pitfalls. Much of the work in the productivity space is focused on build speed or tooling improvements. Although beneficial, there is a larger opportunity available: Non-coding time. Standup updates, XFN alignment, chat, email, task management. All of these constitute the “Dark Matter” overhead that engineers have to deal with on a daily basis. We dive into how Meta measures time, many of Meta’s top-line velocity metrics, and even some insights you can implement today, in order to help your engineers be more productive. 0:00:00 Introduction to dark matter in developer productivity 0:02:55 Data analysis of an engineer's daily workflow 0:06:45 Using data to improve developer productivity tooling 0:08:56 Measuring efficiency with time spent coding per diff 0:13:23 Analyzing workflow intent to reduce noise 0:16:15 Measuring overhead with percent time coding metric 0:19:07 Analyzing and optimizing time spent in meetings 0:22:08 Framework for workflow time spent on specific tasks 0:27:31 Measuring time by business value and future outlook #AI #DeveloperProductivity #DPESummit #Meta #Gradle #BuildSpeeds #CloudDevelopment #Frameworks #Metrics #AuthoringFlow #VSCode #SEV #IncidentManagement #CodeReviews #DesignDocs #Privacy