Platform Team

After discussing Platform Engineering (the discipline) and Internal Developer Platform (the product) in the previous weeks, let’s move on to discuss the Platform Team (the people) this week.

Platform Team is a dedicated group in an organization responsible for creating a self-service layer on top of the scattered tools and technology stack used by the other teams. A successful Platform Team maintains solid guardrails and standards for its customers without compromising their autonomy.

Laying the foundation

Designing and implementing a good foundation is crucial in supporting an organization to grow and run faster toward its goals. The Platform Team must be able to initiate the attempt to lay this foundation that the other teams will follow.

But of course, it is not a one-time job. Although the foundation needs to be stable enough to be usable, it should be able to adapt dynamically to the needs of the other teams.

Simplify complexity

The Platform Team should build tooling that makes things easier and simpler for users. They need to understand the overall setup of the system, so they know what’s essential to be kept visible to the users and what’s safe to be hidden away.

Solve common problems

A good Platform team prevents other teams from repeatedly reinventing the wheel by solving common problems. It’s key to figure out what these common problems are: start by understanding developer pain points and friction areas that cause slowdowns in development.

Advocate best practices

The Platform Team collaborates with other teams to build applications that make the best use of technology. The bigger the organization, the higher the need to spread knowledge systematically regarding best practices across the teams. The platform team will need to stay in the loop regarding team discussions related to tools, tasks, what works, and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t.

Modernize old systems

The Platform Team must drive the other teams to modernize the unstable legacy system. They must detect which component is outdated and when the replacement is ready and ensure a smooth transition.

Sometimes, not all stakeholders think that replacing the old system is a good idea because everything looks normal. However, what looks normal on the surface doesn’t always be like that underneath. Maintaining an old system is problematic because it has security, stability, reliability, and scalability risks. So the Platform Team must be able to make valid points if they believe the system is worth to be modernized.

Being ahead of the curve

The Platform Team must be able to empower the other teams by balancing between giving them what they want and educating them about where they need to go. It forces the Platform Team to stay ahead of the curve so they are always ready when demands come from the other teams.

Suppose the Platform Team doesn’t catch up with the rising demands. In that case, the other teams will build a workaround solution that fits their own needs without considering many aspects like security, stability, maintainability, etc. It is not what an organization wants to have in the long run.

Tech News

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memo Welcome to C# 11

Dika: “Mads Torgersen, The C# Lead Designer, announced the new C# programming language version. There are so many additional features worth trying, like the new raw string literals, required members, newlines in string interpolations, and list patterns. I believe the changes will improve the developer experience during coding.”

memo Detect vulnerable libraries within your GitHub environments for free

Yoga: “GitHub Actions are a powerful tool that can automate projects in CI/CD pipelines and provides security on top of it. This article shows us how to detect libraries’ vulnerabilities in various projects, including .NET projects. Using and configuring CodeSec in our project allows us to detect any vulnerabilities within, along with advice on how to fix them.”

memo AI Image editing from Text! Imagic explained

Rizqun: “Imagic takes such a diffusion-based model able to take text and generate images out of it and adapts the model to edit the images. The model not only understands what you want to show, but it’s also able to stay realistic as well as keeping the properties of the initial images. This is all done from a single input image and a short sentence.”

memo Everything new from GitHub Universe 2022

Frandi: “GitHub Universe 2022 was conducted this week on November 9-10. There were many announcements during the event ranging from different topics. GitHub seems to move its focus away from the social coding platform it is predominantly today and towards an all-included developer and organization environment in the cloud.”