Guest: Mark Fussell (LinkedIn) 
Company: Diagrid (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Code fragmentation with developers having to work across an entire industry of frameworks, libraries, and languages is contributing to the challenges faced by developers. Diagrid Catalyst’s standard set of APIs, which can be used on any form of compute or infrastructure, aims to help boost developer productivity.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk recorded at KubeCon in Chicago, Diagrid CEO and Co-Founder Mark Fussell talks about the developer experience and some of the challenges developers are facing nowadays. Fussell discusses their latest announcement, Diagrid Catalyst, and how it helps tackling some of these key developer challenges.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• One of the highlights of the event has been AppDeveloperCon, which was initiated with CNCF to get app developers talking about what gets built on top of the infrastructure. The event was well attended and topics included designing architectures, developer tools, and serverless systems.
• KubeCon attracted 3000 developers and Fussell feels that since developers are the ones generating money for the companies there needs to be conversations about the tools and application designs that the business needs, but they also want to see for themselves the applications that get delivered on top.
• Fussell gives us some insight into what the developer experience looks like today saying he feels it is very fragmented with developers having to look across a whole industry of frameworks, libraries, and languages. He talks about the challenge of tech sprawl and how many want to break the challenges of being locked into a particular framework or cloud provider. He discusses the movement towards consolidation of frameworks and how Dapr is helping make developers more productive.
• Dapr is the 10th largest project inside CNCF with around 3000 contributors with organizations from financial, manufacturing, and healthcare building on top of it. Fussell provides us with an update on the project and how Diagrid Conductor is helping developers deploy Dapr on top of Kubernetes.
• Fussell talks about their announcement of Diagrid Catalyst that enables you to build applications on any form of compute or infrastructure, communicating across compute and cloud. Diagrid Catalyst aims to democratize building large scale distributed applications using open source frameworks like Dapr but hosting them as APIs.
• The rise in fragmentation of code and complexity is causing developers to feel overwhelmed. Fussell tells us Diagrid is looking at what set of APIs can be agreed on so that developers from different languages and frameworks can coordinate together and to help reduce the fragmentation.
• From Diagrid’s perspective, Fussell does not feel that they have a lot of generative AI today, but he thinks we will start to see generative AI used in many applications. He believes Diagrid will explore the space using generative AI in testing a model or to generate specific code inside an application.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.