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

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
️🚨 Snyk for security scanning
Manual resource creation in each platform
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