Platform Engineering & Platform Teams
Tech Leaders Academy
From Tech Professional to Tech Leader. Interactive live trainings in small groups by experienced Tech Leaders.
Hi,
in today’s newsletter we will focus on the topic of platform engineering. We will give you some insights what platform engineering is, what a platform engineer usually does and invite you to a live event this week.
Let’s get it started ??
What is Platform Engineering?
Before diving deep into the topic, let's start with a brief introduction to platform engineering.
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing, building, and maintaining the underlying infrastructure, tools, and services that support software development and operations within an organization. It’s focus is on creating a robust and scalable platform that enables development teams to build, deploy, and run software applications efficiently. The main goal of platform engineering is to enable development teams, improve productivity, and reduce cognitive load.
Platform engineering can be divided into two main parts. First, it includes handling the underlying infrastructure and tools required for software development, such as cloud infrastructure, version control systems, container orchestration, and monitoring solutions.
Second, platform engineering encompasses developer experience. Developer experience (DX) refers to the overall experience that developers have while working with the platform, tools, and services provided by the organization. It includes various aspects, including ease of use, efficiency, productivity, and satisfaction.
Being a Lead Platform Engineer at Personio
In one episode of Tech Roles Uncovered, Sarah Stemmler spoke with Martin Lechner about his role as Lead Platform Engineer at Personio . His responsibilities include optimizing the deployment system (e.g. installing a canary deployment solution), defining appropriate delivery metrics, and evaluating developer experience. He uses surveys and scores to assess developer satisfaction.
How did Martin come up with developer experience?
Things that should be easy, were actually hard
Martin got in touch with platform engineering at a previous company where the platform team was mainly focussing on infrastructure and tooling. However, he felt that they were lacking focus on developer experience. He spearheaded a part-time working group dedicated to improving developer experience, and was able to dedicate 20% of his time to this effort.
When Martin applied for his role at Personio, he was particularly interested in developer experience. Although he had not previously worked as a full-time platform engineer before, he was eager to take on the new challenge. Martin follows the mission: learning by doing.
To learn about the role of a platform engineer, take a look into Martin's interview.
How to Build Platform Teams
This is an invitation to another free webinar that we will host this Wednesday. Together with our great guest Tobias Mende , we will elaborate the topic of platform engineering even further. We will discuss why and when tech organizations should build platform teams. Platform teams allow to speed up product development in organizations and reduce cognitive load on individual developers.
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Wednesday, 07.06., 5pm CEST
Do You ???to Delete Code?
We definitely do! Analyzing the code base and think where to delete old or irrelevant parts is a great initiative to optimize developer experience. Why? A huge code base often leads to high cognitive load. So it’s better to keep the code volume manageable and clean. If you even manage to reduce the code volume, you reduce cognitive load for you and your team. Lines of Code (LoC) is a difficult metric anyway.
These are 6 ways to keep the code volume low:
领英推荐
We encountered many software projects, where the sheer volume of code was not a result of the huge functionality, rather a result of bad code quality. ??
By the way: The Diff-Screenshot in the image is real! Sebastian made it two years ago. After moving to a modern microservice architecture, Sebastian and the development team were able to delete 150k LoC of code in the legacy project. It was a terrific achievement! As a team, they developed a culture that emphasizes on simple solutions. Whenever a significant amount of LoC was deleted, the team celebrate this achievement together.
What about you? Do you also celebrate deleted LoCs? ??
Finished First Cohort of Team Lead Masterclass ??
It’s a wrap! We finished our first cohort of the Team Lead Masterclass! ??
It was a pleasure to facilitate and deliver this 6-week training for team leads in tech. Thank’s to all attendees for the trustworthy atmosphere, engaging discussions and valuable contributions! ??
We covered a ton of topics relevant for young and experienced team leads in the tech industry. We focused on topics that most come up in agile settings, international and distributed teams that all have to deal with complex software or data projects. Our Masterclass attendees reflected on their current role, which responsibilities they have today and how they want to develop further. They learned practical tools to better deal with time pressure, delegation and control. Further, they learned best practices on how to run 1:1s and performance reviews in order to support the career progression of each team member.
It was a lot of fun and we enjoyed the group dynamics a lot.
If you are new to a team lead role, or you want to refresh your leadership skills, join our next cohort for the Team Lead Masterclass. We are going to start the next round on July 6th. We still have some seats left.
A Data Science Conference without Data Science
On June 28th, 2023, we will be speakers at the Data Science Mania. There are several premieres to celebrate.
Come, and join us at Data Science Mania. There are still some tickets available.
If you want to read what we are going to talk about, read the interview that we did together with the conference organizers.
Did you recognize some differences in this newsletter? Yes, we started to write in English. ?? Our community grows and as we become more international, we decided to switch to English as our main language. From now on most of our content will be written in English. We hope you enjoyed it.
By the way, this newsletter is all about career development and leadership in tech. Is there a specific topic that interests you? Let us know and we will consider it for the next issue. Just send a message.
See you next time ??