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Award-winning engineering portal reimagines developer experience and accelerates time to value

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Summary

Thoughtworks built an internal engineering platform called NEO to improve the developer experience and streamline the development process. It provides self-service capabilities and automates many of the common and complex development tasks, resulting in a 30% reduction of the time needed to turn an idea into a working application. NEO recently won the Foundry CIO 100 award for its innovation and technical excellence. It has been utilized by 700+ teams and is the default for new product development within Thoughtworks. Future features on the roadmap include AWS integration, better personalization & customization, and improved developer profiles.

Q&As

What challenges did Thoughtworks face with kickstarting new internal ideas and projects?
Thoughtworks faced challenges with provisioning infrastructure, discovering core assets, and following the security review process.

How did Thoughtworks reimagine the developer experience?
Thoughtworks reimagined the developer experience by rethinking engineering platforms and building NEO, a platform for a Network Enabled Organization. NEO provides multiple self-service capabilities and developer tools to remove friction and streamline the development process.

What has NEO enabled developers to do?
NEO has enabled developers to self-service onboard team members, discover core assets and internal applications, use development accelerators and starter kits, and standardize infrastructure provisioning and security review process.

What is NEO's impact on Thoughtworks' application development process?
NEO has sped up the application development process, from idea to outcome by an average of 30%.

How has NEO been recognized for its innovation and technical excellence?
NEO recently won Foundry's CIO 100 award, recognizing the innovation and technical excellence of the platform.

AI Comments

👍 The Thoughtworks engineering portal has made a huge impact by reducing the time between project kick offs and production launches. It has also enabled teams to collaborate on projects more effectively and has earned recognition with the CIO 100 award.

👎 Thoughtworks' NEO platform is not available for external use, making it difficult for other organizations to benefit from their innovations.

AI Discussion

Me: It's about an engineering portal that Thoughtworks created called NEO to help developers be more efficient and streamline the development process. It reduces the time it takes to get from idea to outcome by 30%, and it recently won Foundry's CIO 100 award.

Friend: Interesting. What are the implications of this article?

Me: One implication is that it shows how important it is to have an efficient engineering organization to keep up with the demand for tech talent. NEO’s success in reducing development time by 30% could inspire other businesses to invest in similar platforms to increase their operational efficiency and stay competitive. It could also be a signal that automation and self-service capabilities are becoming increasingly important in the development process.

Action items

Research other organizations that have implemented similar engineering platforms to gain insights into best practices.
Reach out to Thoughtworks to discuss the tools and approaches available for streamlining the developer experience.
Explore the podcast mentioned in the article to learn more about how the NEO platform was designed and delivered.

Technical terms

Agile engineering practices: Agile engineering practices are a set of principles and techniques used to develop software in an iterative and incremental way. These practices focus on collaboration, customer feedback, and continuous improvement.
Technology strategy: A technology strategy is a plan for how an organization will use technology to achieve its business goals. It outlines the technology investments, resources, and processes needed to achieve the desired outcomes.
Self-service onboarding: Self-service onboarding is a process that allows users to quickly and easily sign up for a service or product without the need for manual intervention.
Internal Open Source: Internal Open Source (also known as “Innersourcing”) is the practice of making internal software projects available to the public, allowing developers from around the world to contribute to the project.
GCP: GCP stands for Google Cloud Platform, a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google.
GitHub: GitHub is a web-based hosting service for version control using Git.
CircleCI: CircleCI is a continuous integration and delivery platform that automates the software development process.
Kong API: Kong API is an open source API gateway and management platform.
Kafka: Apache Kafka is an open source distributed streaming platform.
Okta: Okta is an identity and access management platform that provides secure single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and user provisioning.