Internal Developer Platforms

Surviving Backstage with Roadie: A Developer Nightmare or Dream?

Today I want to talk about potentially the most important tool in your toolbox. I want to talk about a tool that might enable everyone in your organization to be more productive and self-sufficient. Yet, the tool I want to talk about might win an award for the least user-friendly, hardest to maintain, and, generally speaking, a tool that might cause you to have nightmares and spend a small fortune on a psychologist.

It’s a tool that I recognize as being one of the most impactful tools which, honestly, I do not like at all, yet most of those who use it swear by it.

Did you guess what that tool is?

Automate Everything: How One Manifest Powers Your Entire DevOps Pipeline

Today I want to get back to the first steps when developer platforms are concerned. I want to enable developers to start a new project.

Mastering Developer Portals: Discover & Integrate API Schemas with Port

I am so dissaspointed with developer portal consoles for ignoring the fact that almost everything is discoverable through APIs. Why should I design forms and fields in Backstage if Backstage should be able to ask an API for a schema? Even if that schema is not exactly what I need and I might have to remove parts of it, that’s still easier and better than starting from scratch. It’s a waste of time to do the same thing over and over again. We should define what we have, expose that through an API, and all other tools should just “discover” it. Just as that’s true for, let’s say, kubectl, it should be true for graphical user interfaces.

Hence, I spent months complaining about it and… I got it.

How Platform Engineering Compares to Running a Restaurant

Platform engineering should follow similar patterns as restaurants, yet we often confuse it with a kitchen or a supermarket.

Let me explain.