Olivier Liechti
03 - 04 May 2023 | Alte Kaserne Winterthur
Co-founder and CTO, Avalia Systems
Olivier is CTO at Avalia Systems, which he co-founded in 2016. With a background in software engineering, Olivier has been doing applied research on the human factors in this field. Today, "Developer eXperience" is a buzzword that captures his interests and activities.
Until 2021, Olivier was full professor at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, where he created the Software Engineering research group. Before that, he was software architect at Sun Microsystems. Olivier holds a Ms.C. in Computer Science from Fribourg University (Switzerland) and a Ph.D. from Hiroshima University (Japan).
Workshop
The Power of Developer Portals: a practical introduction to Backstage
Room “Malen” / 1st floor
Backstage is an open source project, created at Spotify and donated to the CNCF. It is a platform for building "Developer Portals": systems that provide a single entry point into the enterprise software ecosystem. Backstage is gaining rapid adoption and is now part of many "developer platform" and "developer experience" initiatives. It helps get a 360 view on the software assets, both from a "build" and a "run" perspective.
The goal of this workshop is to provide a hands-on introduction to Backstage, with enough time to dig into the technical architecture. The attendees will grasp what is involved by a Backstage deployment. They will be able to assess what benefits Backstage could bring into their context.
We will start with an introduction to the platform, and describe its core features: the software catalog, the documentation as code system and the scaffolder. We will also describe its plugin architecture in details, and illustrate this point with a deep dive on some of the plugins created by the community.
During the session, we will also share our learnings while creating portals with clients, particularly in the Brazilian market. We will talk about technical issues, but also about the business benefits observed by adopters.
Prerequisites for this workshop:
Participants attending the workshop with a laptop will be able to create and configure a their own portal based on Backstage. They will go through the process of creating their own plugin, gaining a good understanding of the platform architecture.