How can an Internal Developer Platform improve the developer’s experience?
Making the newcomer developer feel at home in a few weeks
I recently joined the challenge of building an internal developer platform (IDP), it’s something that until then, having worked in software consulting on solutions where impacts are generally perceived externally, I hadn’t realized how problematic can be internal APIs in a company that is growing fast, in the perspective of the arrival of new developers. IDP can help how to improve the experience of developers internally, avoid development waste, evolve knowledge management and governance over the built APIs?
IDP working for newcomers
The problems you want to cover with an IDP will depend on what is blocking the newcomer developers to feel safe and sound on their work daily basis, in this specific project we are working on discoverability, standardization, API health metrics.
Discoverability
We’re aiming for strategies to catalog as much as possible developed components/APIs (each repository has a catalog-info.yaml file, the teams must keep this file updated). When developers have to emerge with a new solution, they can check before which APIs already exist, accelerating the development, once the API is well-documented developers will be able to learn, test, and increase the consumption and reuse.
Standardization
One of the big issues at companies that are growing fast is to keep software engineering patterns, the idea of standardization is the opposite to cut off the squad autonomy. Through templates, by the way, everyone can contribute building some template to be reused by other teams, the IDP help the developers by giving them a repository, a CI/CD pipeline, and minimal infra resources configurated, the only developer concern is what to implement logically speaking (write code).
Metrics accessible
Peter Drucker famously said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, could be applied for all perspectives, since the specific microservice health to a marketing campaign, lunch a new feature and so go on.
In the case of IDP, we allow developers access to meaningful metrics, DevOps teams will be chasing The Four Key Accelerate Metrics, Feature teams will be looking at APMs.
IDP can simply provide all those information, by using integrations and bringing dashboards, this can clarify a lot in the mind of a newcomer developer, what needs to have attention, luckily the IDP will be there for you.
I want to build an IDP
If you are convinced IDP can be a good thing and you want to take a shot, in this particular project that I mentioned at beginning of this article, we decide to speed up the development of our project, to do that we are using an amazing open platform named Backstage, you’ll find an activity community there to help you in your first steps.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, everybody wants to see a catalog easy to use, understand and applicable for daily necessities, have tools that improve your productivity, and see the impacts of your deliveries through metrics, once you’re a newcomer developer you probably wants to deliver fast and show your value, the developer portal can be your shortcut.
