As Spotify grew in number of developers, services and complexity, our velocity was significantly slowing down. Preserving the squads’ autonomy and reducing the time of onboarding (60+ days for the first 10 pull requests) were major challenges destined to increase. You'll learn how Spotify reached the 80%+ of satisfaction of its techies through the creation of Backstage: open platform for building developer portals. You'll see live demos of how things are done in Spotify and you'll learn how to be part of a hyper-growing community devoted to making the developers happy (Backstage Community).

1. Francesco Corti
How Spotify reaches the 80%+ of satisfaction
of the techies making developers happy

2. Francesco Corti
Product Manager
Platform
Developer
Experience
Tribe (PDX) “Speed up Spotify
by providing teams
with a simple,
consistent and
delightful
experience”
Developer
Experience

3. 2022
Developer Experience
Time Machine
GO

4. Outcome
ServiceDB (with both a backend and a frontend)
SysModel (the service)
System-Z (the frontend)
Initiative
Offsite workshop and some meetings
Challenge
Microservice management
(who is owning what, what is in production, dependency between software components, technology adoption)
2014
Developer Experience
Time Machine

5. Outcome
ServiceDB (with both a backend and a frontend)
SysModel (the service)
System-Z (the frontend)
Initiative
Offsite workshop and some meetings
Challenge
Microservice management
(who is owning what, what is in production, dependency between software components, technology adoption)
2014
Developer Experience
Time Machine

6. 2015
Outcome
Golden Paths
Initiative
A dozen of very experienced engineers write a
coherent guide for how to create and deploy
backend services
SysModel scales well
Best practices and onboarding are gaps
Challenge
Maintain the speed while growing
Developer Experience
Time Machine
# of days to submit the first 10 PRs:
60

7. 2015
Outcome
Golden Paths
Initiative
A dozen of very experienced engineers write a
coherent guide for how to create and deploy
backend services
SysModel scales well
Best practices and onboarding are gaps
Challenge
Maintain the speed while growing
Developer Experience
Time Machine
# of days to submit the first 10 PRs:
60
# of days to submit the first 10 PRs:
60 20

8. 2016
Developer Experience
Time Machine
Initiative
First skeleton for services
(Java-based backend services)
Outcome
Scaffolding to create software components (MVP)
Challenge
Speed in creating software (components)
Github repository, authentication, CI/CD, deployment, permits and more
Standardization without compromising autonomy (controlled-chaos)
Security, documentation, repository structure, policies and more

9. Demo using Backstage Internal:
Creating a Software Component

10. Demo using Backstage Internal:
Creating a Software Component

11. Demo using Backstage Internal:
Creating a Software Component

12. Demo using Backstage Internal:
Creating a Software Component

13. Demo using Backstage Internal:
Creating a Software Component

14. Demo using Backstage Internal:
Creating a Software Component

16. 2018
Developer Experience
Time Machine
Challenge
The number of devs and software components continue to grow
System-Z and Golden Paths help developers
Developers want to contribute
Outcome
Initiative
Plugin APIs to enable developers to contribute
SystemZ re-written in React

17. Demo using Backstage Open Source:
How to develop a Plugin

18. 2019
Developer Experience
Time Machine
Challenge
Royalty Platform creates 20+ plugins
Technical documentation and search is a gap
Outcome
TechDocs
ElasticSearch integration
Initiative
Plugin development
(everything in Backstage is a plugin)

19. Demo using Backstage Internal:
TechDoc (editing, corrections)
&
Golden Paths

20. Demo using Backstage Internal:
TechDoc (editing, corrections)
&
Golden Paths

21. Demo using Backstage Internal:
TechDoc (editing, corrections)
&
Golden Paths

22. Demo using Backstage Internal:
TechDoc (editing, corrections)
&
Golden Paths

23. Demo using Backstage Internal:
Search
&
viewing a Software Component

24. 2020
Developer Experience
Time Machine
Challenge
Other companies want the same
(but they all use a different set of services)
Initiative
An internal hackathon to explore open source
distribution of internal Backstage
Outcome
Backstage open source

25. 2021
Developer Experience
Time Machine

26. 2021
Developer Experience
Time Machine

27. 2021
Developer Experience
Time Machine

29. Backstage
simplifies
the DevEx
treating developers as humans
not extension of code
2022
Developer Experience
Time Machine

30. Happy developers make happy code
Francesco Corti
Product Manager at .
francescoc@spotify.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fcorti/
FrkCorti
https://backstage.io