Niek Palm
Principal Engineer in the Philips Software Center of Excellence
Niek is a Principal Engineer in the Philips Software Center of Excellence. He supports businesses in the goal of building better software and engineering practices. Niek is closely involved in shaping the future of software within Philips by driving DevOps culture transformation. He is playing a key role in driving the InnerSource community in Philips to build faster, better software together. He is also passionate about open source and active maintainer of some popular projects.
From Friction to Flow: Enabling Collaboration and Developer Experience at Scale
Traditionally, software development happened in closed systems on on-prem hardware. However, this approach led to high friction in knowledge sharing, difficulty in onboarding developers, and a lack of continuous modernization. In this session, we’ll share how we broke down silos and enabled a community of 8000+ developers to co-create on InnerSource principles using a modern stack of tools built around GitHub.
We’ll discuss how we transformed software development by bringing auto-scaling CI/CD runners to the full enterprise, enabling developers to use a software catalog based on Backstage to bootstrap projects and share software components. We’ll also cover how we balanced compliance, regulatory requirements, and speed of development.
Our enabling services are based on Open Source and AWS Serverless components. We’ll discuss how we built and maintain this stack. How we Open Sourced the framework to scale the runners, and how we built a developer portal based on Backstage.
Through our experiences breaking down silos and enabling collaboration and continuous delivery at scale, this session aims to provide valuable insights for organizations looking to do the same. By the end of this session, you’ll gain a better understanding of the lessons we learned and the pitfalls we encountered.
