Internal developer platforms can help engineers be more productive by providing tools they need. Such platforms are best developed by fellow engineers who understand their needs. They work best when guided by principles like reducing cognitive load through sane defaults, opinionation, and self-service abilities. Anti-patterns to avoid include making the API too broad, not contributing changes back, and neglecting documentation and support.

1. Internal Developer Platforms:
How to make the engineers your
best friends
Crystal Hirschorn
Director of Engineering, Snyk
@cfhirschorn

2. Lead
engineer
Engineer Engineer
CTO Product
designer
CEO

4. “Who better to write the tools
for developers, than your fellow
developers.
“
Sarah Drasner,
Eng Director, Google

5. The “types” of
work of
Platform teams

7. Socio-technical
systems:
why organisational
design matters

9. Platform
guiding
principles

10. “Operations is the constellation of your
organizational memory: patterns, practices,
habits, defaults, aspirations, expertise, tools,
and everything else used to deliver business
value to users.
“
Charity Majors,
CTO, Honeycomb.io

11. Pave roads for
common
workflows

12. Reducing
cognitive load

13. Sane defaults

14. Opinionated

15. Dogfood to
create empathy

16. Self-service

17. APIs and levels
of abstraction

19. Anti-patterns

21. API surface too
broad

22. “Not invented
here”

23. Not tending to your
garden
(docs, training,
upgrades, patching)

24. Thank you!
@cfhirschorn