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

Manual Project Setup Flow

• 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

  • Manual resource creation in each platform