Building platforms–Strike the right balance

There is a lot of hype around platform engineering these days. The concept of creating platform teams and building platforms to deliver software at scale is not new as companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix etc. have a long history of building developer platforms. And also the much quoted Team Topologies book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais was already released in 2019.

Some wonder if this is just a fancy new name for existing practices and if there is a risk that these developer platforms become a bottleneck, exactly what they are supposed to alleviate. Some dare even say that we made today’s development landscape so horrendously complex that we need these platforms to hide all this complexity.

No matter if you think Platform Engineering is overhyped or not, before you go on this journey I would like to share the following quote:

If your users haven’t build something that surprised you, you probably didn’t build a platform

I saw this quote in the Build abstractions not illusions talk by Gregor Hophe where he shared the following visual:

From the Build Abstractions not Illusions talk by Gregor Hophe

I think this is the most important design consideration when you start creating your own developer platform. You’ve successfully build a platform when you strike the right balance between hiding complexity and developer productivity without compromising their creativity. In that way it is related to the Paved road concept I talked about before.

So when you decide to go the Developer Platform route don’t forget that the real goal is NOT to deliver the platform but to support our developers allowing them to get more done.

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities. DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

The art of simplicity

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