Developers are experiencing a new generation in which not only is the excellent realization of infrastructures and automations considered, but also the process of their creation and operation.
Why do you need it?
As we wrote in the previous article, platform engineering should allow developers to use capabilities that previously depended on DevOps and SRE people; it should not increase the cognitive load and development time, but the opposite.
Here are 5 principles that will help you understand and even realize a good developer experience:
Bi-weekly meetings. The meetings should help the dev teams and platform team to understand DevEx issues and the suggested improvement by the dev teams, like DevOps (the dev teams can ask for new capabilities/automations or even additional knowledge needed to improve platform engineering in the org). This approach should not be based on the platform team only, but should be based on all the participant teams (dev and platform).
Knowledge is a power. If there is missing info in the dev teams, help them to narrow the gap by learning with digital courses [link to our courses page], interactive docs, and so on.
Build the blocks and not the building. Build any part of the service/infrastructure like a small block (module) and provide the developers with their own “building,” rather than “renovate” a building you constructed. It will then be easier for the platform team with releases and also will be easier for the dev team with customizing services by their needs.
You build a product—a real product. Refer to all the tools you build like real products, with marketing, onboarding, documentation, and of course UX. 🙂
Developers portal. This should help the developers to see the “big picture” of the architecture in one screen (all the microservices, domains, and the relevant resources—like tests, CI/CD, cloud resources, and more). Additionally, the portal should be used for serving the automations and tools in one centralized place (e.g., an automation for creating a new microservice, Scaffolder).
Learn more about Developers portal 👉 here.
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