Fifteen years ago, I was deployed into bank environments — Tier-1 institutions running massive digital transformations. My job? Lead teams, deliver complex software on time, and somehow get hundreds of customer developers to adopt entirely new ways of working.
Nobody called it “Developer Experience” back then. But that’s exactly what it was.
I had to make onboarding frictionless — because we couldn’t afford weeks of ramp-up on a fixed-timeline project. I had to automate builds, standardise deployments, and create reusable platforms — because my team’s efficiency depended on it. I had to win buy-in from developers who didn’t choose this change — because the project would fail without them.
Every tactic I used? Today we’d call it DevOps. Platform Engineering. Golden Paths. Internal Developer Platforms.
I just called it “the only way to deliver.”
That instinct carried me from Istanbul to Amsterdam — from architecting banking platforms at VeriPark, to standardising the SDLC for thousands of developers at Booking, to now leading Platform Engineering at TomTom where we consolidated 20+ fragmented tools into one platform, cut build times from 2 hours to 10 minutes, and support over 1 billion API calls a day.
The titles changed. The scale changed. But the core obsession never did:
Remove friction. Empower engineers. Let the business move faster.
What I’ve learned across two decades is that Platform Engineering isn’t a tooling decision — it’s a leadership philosophy. It’s about treating your infrastructure as a product and your developers as customers. It’s change management as much as it is architecture.
And honestly? I still get the same kick watching an engineer’s face when something that used to take days now takes minutes.
This is the work. It always has been.