# Developer Portal 👨‍💻

## Introduction

In early 2023, our engineering teams were spending one to three weeks per month manually setting up new projects leading to significant productivity loss and inconsistent configurations. After doing a developer survey and quantifying the impact, I built a self-service developer portal using Backstage that reduced project setup time from one week to less than an hour. This presentation walks through the journey of designing and implementing this solution.

## Problem Space 🔍

* ⏰ **Time Cost**: \~1 week per project setup
* 📈 **Monthly Impact**: 1-3 projects = Up to 3 weeks engineering time lost
* 👥 **Scale**: Supporting 200+ engineers
* 💸 **Business Cost**: \~$15,000 per project setup (assuming average engineer salary)

#### Time Breakdown ⏱️

```
Project Setup Timeline:
├── Infrastructure Setup: 2-3 days
├── Access Management: 1 day
├── Platform Integration: 1-2 days
└── Testing & Validation: 1 day
```

## Pain Points Identified Through Survey

<figure><img src="https://1588585907-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-MTwgToRvLjYdjfpAVgP%2Fuploads%2FcPTkab2i8wgM012pfhF9%2Fimage.png?alt=media&#x26;token=2d03e95f-cbab-4edc-a9df-65f3ce4e04d6" alt=""><figcaption><p>Manual Project Setup Flow</p></figcaption></figure>

* **Infrastructure Challenges** 🏗️
  * Engineers lacking IaC knowledge and taking time to understand guidelines
  * Limited terraform expertise in product teams
* **Repository Setup Issues** 🔐
  * Manual repository creation
  * Time-consuming GitHub team setup
  * Inconsistent repository settings
* **Platform Integration Friction** 🔄
  * Context switching between platforms:
    * 🔍 Sentry for error tracking
    * 📊 Datadog for monitoring
    * 🚦 LaunchDarkly for feature flags
    * [️🚨](https://emojis.wiki/security/) Snyk for security scanning
  * Manual resource creation in each platform