Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly, your weekly shred on the platform engineering slopes. This week we’re talking about something near and dear to my heart.

please just let us code

I get a lot of opportunities to look at and talk about platforms. And I talk to many platform engineers, whether it’s through the community course, Platform Engineering Slack, or PlatformCon. I also get visibility on how thousands of developers are interacting with Internal Developer Platforms.

That’s to say, I get a pretty good insight into a lot of platform engineering. And today I want to dissect two truths that seem to be a constant in our world right now.

1. Most teams starting on their platform engineering journey think they need to have a portal
2. 98.2% of developers opt for code-based interaction when organizations give them the choice

So, what am I trying to tell you with these two seemingly contradictory truths? That Portals are useless? No. There is lots of value that comes from portals.

But we can’t overoptimize on them. The goal of platform engineering has always been about building golden paths, streamlining and automating workflows that improve developer experience, and at the same time making lives easier for infrastructure and operations with better standardization and security.

Slapping a portal on top of your disjointed setup and celebrating your platform success or worse… mandating the use of templates within the portal in a kind of golden cage is absolutely NOT the path to platform engineering success.

So why do we keep doing it?

A cynic would say that it’s because a portal represents a quick win. But in talking to dozens of teams, there is a genuine desire to improve the experience for people. It’s just in my view a misunderstanding of what people want.

Devs don’t want to be forced to click around in a UI to use a very specific template that may or not serve what we want. Not to mention how that easy-use template means Infra has to spend dozens of hours maintaining all the resources that were blasted out by the portal.

We want the choice to use the interface that best suits us. We want a platform that thinks holistically and improves developer workflows and experience, without creating a mess for someone else to clean up.

We want a platform that thinks about the backend and the frontend and understands how it will touch and interact with each part of the team, or organization.

So let’s get building it.

Quick bites

Article of the week:

• Crowdstrike cybersecurity firm says its software update triggered worldwide Microsoft IT outages - The news we’re all watching right now

From the community:

• How to build a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) in four phases - don’t miss next week's webinar!