Hello everyone, I'm Ghislain Proulx, software architect at iA Financial Group. In my presentation, I talked about our developer experience initiative, from what triggered it to how we planned to improve the developer experience and what we've accomplished so far. I'd be more than happy to discuss it and answer your questions here. 🧵

@Ghislain Proulx do you think ai or platform engineering will have bigger impact. did you build the chat bot yourself or provider?

Thanks @Xewat !! I think both will serve us well at different times. We're already seeing great value in using AI to help developers in their day-to-day discussions, using GitHub Copilot or the chatbot to get answers that are more specific to our context. On the other hand, platform engineering will enable us to abstract the complexity of the infrastructure so that teams can focus primarily on delivering business value rather than on the "plumbing" of the infrastructure (YAML K8s files, Helm graphs, Terraform, etc.).

Exciting for the future

@Xewat And, for the chatbot, we began our exploration with this solution: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ai-azure-ai-services-blog/introducing-the-chat-with-your-data-solution-accelerator-now/ba-p/3958979 Microsoft then included this solution in its Azure OpenAI Studio, and we took our experimentation a step further with : https://oai.azure.com/portal . And we're now in the process of deploying it on our Azure subscriptions to maximize the automation between our live documentation and this tool. We've already quickly checked out this tool that I know Humanitec also uses, which provides a SaaS version of a chatbot for internal or external use: kapa.ai - Instant AI Answers to Technical Questions And there are probably many other options to achieve the same goal, but so far we're happy with this one and are used to the fail fast approach that gives us a quick retraction which then helps us make better decisions in the long term.

Thanks Ghislain! I was very interested in knowing what you guys were doing at IA, being in the same city and all. 😉 What I find particularly interesting is that you avoided the trap of starting with an in-house portal, or even Backstage, even pushing for later any work on a portal. I really like that you're taking an iterative approach.

Hey! Thanks Sylvain! 😄 You're right! The internal developer platform and the internal developer portal, even if they share the same acronym, are two really different beasts with different objectives. Both add great value, but having a portal without a platform is much less useful, IMHO.