In today’s tech landscape, enhancing the developer experience is crucial for any successful platform engineering effort. This principle lies at the heart of this discussion. Imagine if software engineers were like a group of friends planning a vacation – you’ve got the over-prepared one with spreadsheets for everything, the one who insists on winging it, and the mediator who somehow keeps everyone on track. Now, translate that chaos into a professional setting.  

Just like a vacation, improving the developer experience requires coordination, communication, and a bit of humor to keep everyone sane. So, let’s dive into some insightful and entertaining scenarios that highlight the importance of making the developer experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible. Because, let’s face it, even the best engineers need a good laugh and a great work environment. 

Keeping Customers at the Centre 

Ultimately, what organizations care about most are their customers. Every organization aims to engage customers more by delivering new, meaningful features and capabilities that are easy to use and reliable. Constant feedback is necessary to measure the quality of the customer experience. Customers can be consumers or partners, depending on the business context. For example:

• Retail Business: Shoppers are the customers. 
• Gaming Company: Gamers are the customers. 

An organization’s most valuable IT assets include APIs, apps, websites, and products used by internal or external users. Infrastructure, security, IT operations, and automation are the functions that help application engineering teams deliver these capabilities securely and at scale. Organizations must react quickly to changing customer behaviour patterns and adjust engagement accordingly, making application delivery velocity critical. 

Understanding the Developer’s Journey 

From a developer’s perspective, the journey from ideation to production is often fraught with challenges. while writing code has become easier, taking that code through to production and keeping it running smoothly is a complex task. This complexity stems from the need to build robust infrastructure, ensure security, and comply with various standards.  The skills required for this journey are immense, making the role of a full-stack developer particularly challenging. 

“The developer’s journey is like a bumpy ride, encountering friction points at various stages. It’s not just about writing code; it’s about crafting the architecture, ensuring infrastructure integrity, and navigating different deployment stages.” – Rob Hirschfeld 

Key Stages in the Developer’s Journey 

Stage	Challenges	Solutions through Platform Engineering
Ideation	Collaborative tools, Clear Documentation	Collaborative tools, Clear Documentation
Development	Coding standards, integration issues	Standardized development environments, CI/CD pipelines
Testing	Inconsistent test environments	Automated testing frameworks, environment as code
Deployment	Deployment failures, rollback complexities	Container orchestration, blue-green deployments, feature flags
Maintenance	Monitoring, scaling, security patches	Centralized monitoring, auto-scaling, automated patching

The Growing Importance of Developer Productivity 

Top developer talent is scarce and continues to see a rise in demand. Consequently, tech leaders are increasingly focused on enhancing developer productivity and the overall developer experience. One potential solution to this challenge is platform engineering. 

“The trend that we’re seeing is that we just want developers to get what they need as easily, as possible, so we can get the time to market as low as possible.” Neil Wylie – Chief Architect for Platform Engineering, CDW 

Enhancing Collaboration and Reducing Friction 

The fundamental goal of platform engineering is to enhance collaboration between teams. By reducing the burden on developers to manage infrastructure, security, and networking, platform engineering allows them to focus on writing and refining code. This approach ensures that developers are not bogged down by operational tasks and can work more efficiently

In traditional setups without dedicated platform engineering teams, developers often face friction when their choices do not align with operational requirements. This misalignment can lead to breaks in the process, creating inefficiencies and disruptions. Platform engineering seeks to eliminate these issues by providing standardized, automated environments that developers can easily access and use.

The Role of Platform Engineering

Platform engineering is defined as a service-oriented operations infrastructure that consolidates operational experiences across multiple development teams. 

 Unlike traditional models, platform engineering views developers as customers, aiming to serve internal teams as a shared resource. This approach allows for flexibility in development workflows while maintaining operational efficiency. 

Let’s explore how a media production company improved its developer experience through effective platform engineering. In such a company, diverse teams like animators and developers need to collaborate seamlessly. To facilitate this, the platform engineering team develop a set of APIs that significantly improve workflows:

• Infrastructure Provisioning: Automating the setup of development and production environments. 
• CI/CD Pipelines: Standardizing the build and deployment processes across projects. 
• Monitoring and Logging: Centralized dashboards for real-time monitoring and logging, ensuring quick identification and resolution of issues. 

Platform Engineering & Developer Experience 

Keeping developers at the centre of IT operations is key to success because they are the ones delivering direct value to customers. To achieve this, developers need:  

• Easy Experimentation: Tools that facilitate rapid prototyping and testing. 
• Seamless Deployment: The ability to deploy code/applications without worrying about infrastructure, security, or compliance. 
• Minimal Waiting: Reducing the time waiting for approvals for routine tasks. 
• Observability: Tools to monitor the behaviour of deployed code. 
• SLO/SLA Compliance: Ensuring service level objectives and agreements are met for end consumers. 
• Hidden Security: Security setups that enforce consistency across environments without being intrusive. 
• Appropriate Access Levels: Managing permissions to avoid unintended access or costs. 
• Consistency: Uniform processes for deploying and managing cloud assets. 
• Drift Detection: Tools to identify and address deviations from the desired state. 
• Auditing Capabilities: Ensuring compliance and traceability in cloud environments. 

How to Start Building a Platform to Support Developers 

A common mistake is to start by looking for commercial or open-source tools or hiring consultants to build a platform. Instead, the first step should be a developer survey to understand the current and desired future state of the developer experience. Key areas to explore include: 

• Biggest Pain Points: Identifying the main obstacles developers face. 
• Common Application Patterns: Understanding the typical workflows and tools used. 
• Cloud Adoption Frictions: Discovering barriers to cloud technology adoption. 
• Time on Infrastructure: Measuring time spent waiting for infrastructure, security, and networking. 
• Desired Experience: Capturing the ideal development and deployment experience from the developers’ perspective. 

Transparency in the survey is crucial, and it should be limited to developers and those directly supporting them, like product owners, release engineers, and operators. Understanding both the current and future state helps identify the necessary steps to achieve the desired improvements. 

Leveraging Generative AI for Enhanced Automation 

Generative AI offers new possibilities for improving the reliability and effectiveness of automation. It can be utilized to create, review, and refine automation scripts, thus enhancing their dependability and minimizing the likelihood of errors.

Benefits of Generative AI in Automation 

• Improved Script Quality: AI can identify potential issues and optimize scripts for better performance. 
• Continuous Validation: AI can continuously test automation scripts, ensuring they remain functional over time. 
• Reduced Human Error: Automation of routine tasks reduces the likelihood of human error, enhancing overall reliability.  

Measuring Benefits and Impact 

To measure the success of platform engineering efforts, organizations should focus on several key metrics: 

Metric	Description
Developer Productivity	reduction in At the end of the day, this is all about developer happiness and customer love . When our tools, services, and systems support efficient ways of working at scale (without compromising privacy, security or compliance), developers are freed up to apply their ingenuity to the more creative aspects of collaborating and product making
Time to Market	Speed at which code moves from ideation to production
operational Efficiency	Reduction in time & resources spent on maintaining infrastructure
Security & compliance	Consistency & effectiveness of security measures across environments
Collaboration Levels	Degree of collaboration between development & operations Teams

Conclusion: Setting the Right Direction 

  At the end of the day, this is all about developer happiness and customer love . When our tools, services, and systems support efficient ways of working at scale (without compromising privacy, security or compliance), developers are freed up to apply their ingenuity to the more creative aspects of collaborating and product making. Enterprises get the impact they’ve invested in, end-customers get products they love and trust, and the developers who deliver that impact and build those products feel more purposeful and satisfied than ever before. All’s possible with Platform Engineering. It can take work to establish a practice, but the payoff is worth it, and we’ll be here to share more learnings along the way.