Your Developer Portal is not magic!

Ah, yes, the mythical spell that solves all your problems without much effort. We have been chasing this throughout the years, but everything always seems to fall short, even most of the AI hype. Why? There is significant sets of complexity throughout an organization that can be difficult to understand and even harder to navigate.

Your dev portal will only magnify and shine light on your internal issues.

Developer Experience friction takes all shapes but three major themes emerge, people, process, and technology. A developer portal can help with these, if designed and implemented correctly, but it will not fix a lot of these challenges.

For example, a good dev portal will provide engineering teams with a set of tools to complete certain jobs like new service creation, a database, or a static code analysis tool. This sounds great, and it can be, but if there is no common set of tools, processes, or configuration for these tools then what happens. You now have to decide what are the right things to actually provide? Should you use Postgress? Dynamo? Mongo? All of them? This can create a sprawl of tooling to support and maintain without much consideration towards what is being used. This is where your enterprise architecture needs to step in.

This is a great example of technology problem that can and should be solved through a Tech Radar. What about process problems, a good dev portal should have a scaffolder and that should help to solve things, right? While a good scaffolder and go a long way toward process automation, it will not solve operational issues like manual tickets, approvals, or the reliance upon multiple teams.

For example, say I want to create a new Kubernetes cluster. This should take few pretty simple commands on kubectl or running a template in a dev portal but rarely is that what really needs to happen. For many organizations there are cloud intake forms, environment creation, security questionnaire and network setups. This can create weeks of time with many different meetings and feedback cycles.

Will a dev portal help with all of this… no… or at least not without leaning into overall developer experience improvements.

Developer experience is a strategic journey that requires a consistent focus and a culture of process improvement. This can take many different shapes both large and small but its the consistency and focus that really make the difference, one small piece at a time.