Developer Experience 2.0. Platform Engineering in the Age of AI (en Inglés) - Naveen Alok

Your developers are your biggest investment. Are you getting the return you deserve?

Engineering teams are expensive-often 25-40% of total headcount at technology companies. Yet studies consistently show developers spend nearly half their time on "invisible work": fighting configuration, waiting for builds, navigating fragmented tools, and searching for information that should be at their fingertips.

The math is simple but painful. A 10% improvement in developer productivity at a company with 500 engineers saves millions annually. A 20% improvement equals the output of 100 additional engineers-without the hiring costs.

Developer Experience 2.0 shows you how to capture these gains through platform engineering-the discipline of building internal systems that developers actually want to use.

What You'll Learn

This comprehensive guide takes you from understanding developer friction to building AI-ready platforms:

• The Problem Space: Anatomy of developer friction, measuring DevEx with SPACE and DORA metrics, building the business case for investment

• Platform Foundations: Developer portals with Backstage, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, ephemeral environments, and production-grade observability

• Closing the Gaps: Why current solutions fall short, the knowledge crisis in engineering organizations, and the intelligence gap that AI will fill

• The AI-Powered Future: AI agents for developer experience, autonomous operations, the new developer workflow, and building platforms that serve both humans and AI

• Practical Implementation: Phase-by-phase roadmap from foundation to autonomy, team structures, technology selection, and metrics that matter

Who This Book Is For

• Platform Engineers building internal developer platforms and seeking patterns that scale

• Engineering Leaders making strategic decisions about developer experience investment

• DevOps Practitioners transitioning from operations to platform thinking

• CTOs and VPs who need to connect platform investment to business outcomes

• Organizations scaling from 50 to 5,000+ engineers who want to maintain velocity

What Makes This Book Different

This isn't theory. It's guidance from a practitioner who supports 5,000+ engineers across 100+ teams at a global enterprise. Every pattern has been tested. Every recommendation comes from experience.

More importantly, this book prepares you for what's coming. AI is transforming software development faster than most realize. The platforms you build today must serve AI agents alongside human developers. This book shows you how-with concrete architectural guidance and implementation patterns.

Inside You'll Find

• 19 chapters covering the complete DevEx landscape • Ready-to-use survey templates and interview guides • Platform engineering patterns catalog • Metrics reference with industry benchmarks • Tool landscape overview and evaluation criteria • Implementation roadmap with phase-by-phase guidance • Glossary of 40+ key terms

The Future Is Frictionless

The best engineering organizations treat developer experience as a strategic advantage-not overhead. They measure it, invest in it, and continuously improve it. They build platforms that disappear into the background, letting developers focus on what matters: solving problems worth solving.

This book shows you how to join them.

"Software is eating the world. Developer experience determines how fast."