Chapter 1: My Insights and Tips for Platform Engineering Starters

In the last year, I’ve led the Platform Engineering team in Toluna, and here are some insights and tips for the beginners who start building the internal developers’ platform in an organization.

First and foremost, you must remember that you are building a product — a real product.

It is no longer about scripts and tools that will be used by you for problems that you will solve yourself, as it was until now, and it is not about processes that you will maintain yourself, but a product that your users, the developers of the organization, will know how to use by themselves to solve problems or create stuff that they would have created with your help until now.

The product you build will be used by the developers in the organization to optimize processes, build stuff, and get capabilities they didn’t have until now, such as building a cloud infrastructure for their application.

1. Focus on DevEx

The products you build should be easily accessible to the user, aided by:

• Documentation about the product/feature and a README for the code and its use.
• A joint meeting that introduces the tool and its use.
• Simple running and usage of the tools, which should not require new knowledge from the developers; try to avoid frustration and waste of precious time as much as possible.
• Minimalism of tools and interfaces that will help reduce overload — every update from the Platform and the Workflow stages will be updated in the SCM , for example: comments and updates in the Pull-Request interface, dynamic data in the README file, and so on.

2. Education — Is Your Day-to-Day Work

This is an important part of establishing a platform that aims to provide users with capabilities from areas they were not familiar with before, such as networking, cloud resources, pipelines, and more.

Make an effort on education resources, like digital courses, demo meetings, and even workshops with the developers.

3. Communication

One of the most important things you have to implement between yourself and the developers is communication.

Weekly meetings will help you understand how the work is progressing with the tools you have built and what the users’ difficulties are.

Define within the team that when the user has a problem, this is the top priority work. This conduct will enable a better service experience for your users and will also provide the entire team with learning and understanding about the quality of the tools you have built.

4. Platform Advocates

As with a real product that is marketed outside, choose the most satisfied customers, those who are well versed in your tools and code but also strongly believe in the benefits and value you bring to the organization.

Read the follow-up article to understand more about Platform Advocates.