What comes first: Developer Portal or Developer Platform

I recently did an interview with my friends over at Port around the topic of What comes first: Developer Platform or Developer Portal. They have distilled the conversation into a nice article.

Most companies do not have a fully fledged internal developer platform when they begin their platform engineering journey. How do they align that with the decision on when to begin implementing an internal developer portal? How do they choose what to begin with - portal or platform - and how do they create something with enough significance for developers?

Chris: It’s confusing; you’ve come to the conclusion that you need to change your existing software development environment, perhaps as part of a shift to platform engineering. You keep hearing the terms ‘Internal Developer Platform’ and ‘Internal Developer Portal’. You know what they are (if you don’t - read this first), but you don’t know which one you need for your organization first. It’s a chicken and egg question.

To get the answer, take a product management approach to identify where your organization’s  waste and friction truly lies. To get answers from your developers,  create a good feedback loop using surveys, interviews and other methods like value stream mapping (more on this later). 

If you have nothing to start with, then perhaps building a platform might be best for you, whereas if you’re trying to go through some kind of transformation, a portal may be best. Too often, engineering teams are spending time, energy and money doing something they think is right, but isn't what developers actually need to improve their processes, save time, or reduce toil.

This is a just a small snippet, you can find the rest of the article here or at the link below.

https://www.getport.io/blog/what-comes-first-developer-platform-or-developer-portal