Frontend platform documentation

Why a frontend platform?

A frontend platform increases your development velocity and releases frequency and reliability.

In Platform as a Runtime, Aviran Mordo, VP engineering at Wix.com describe it best as “Successful companies deliver high quality products fast so engineers thus need to deliver high quality code fast” and he argues there is no better way to do that than to provide a way for software engineers in the organization to focus mainly on business logic code. “The platform brings a lot of value to the developers, we managed to improve our internal developer’s velocity by 50%-80%.”

I have observed similar productivity gains at Zalando after we setup the Web Platform Team.

Key benefits

Increased developer productivity thanks to a streamlined development process

Reduced operational overhead and costs through centralizing tooling and infrastructure

Faster time to market thanks to opinionated golden paths for specific actions

Improved page load performance thanks to an optimized build process

Increased reliability with codified best practices and automated testing

I believe best practices should be codified and automated as much as possible to really scale and reap their benefits. This means that this doumentation encourages strong conventions and consistency to simplify and standardize your development process.

This documentation will explain you how to achieve these benefits steps by steps with workflows, proven recipes and examples.

How do I use this documentation?

This documentation is split into multiple sections, each focusing on a specific aspect of your Frontend Platform.

You can use this documentation as a guide to setup your own Frontend Platform, or as a reference to solve a specific problem.

Companies using a Frontend Platform

Besides Wix.com, many companies have already setup their own Frontend Platform such as HubSpot who created a Frontend Platform team to streamline development for 200+ frontend developers, you can read about it here.

“HubSpot has organized a Frontend Platform team to provide a strong foundation for our frontend stack. This keeps HubSpot frontend developers as productive and efficient as possible in continuously creating value for our customers, and helps those small autonomous teams operate together.”

I also found interesting anecdotal evidence from Reddit that highlights the business value of a Frontend Platform:

“I don’t have an answer for how those teams started but usually it boils down to business value - we can ship features at a much higher velocity when we don’t have to work double duty maintaining infrastructure. I literally only have to care about my feature and not updating 10 build tools/scripts, dealing with borked dependency bumps, CI/CD…”

The value is there, the question is how to get there with your current setup quickly and efficiently. This is where I can help you so do not hesitate to reach out!