When you’re creating a product specifically for developers, developer experience (DX) is paramount. Introduce friction, they churn. Not enough onboarding resources, users never convert. But if you can provide these things, paired with real solutions to problems they’re already having in their day-to-day work, you might bring them into your community, or even grow that relationship into an external advocate.

Platform.sh a Platform-as-a-Service and a DevOps platform that places few restrictions on the types of applications you can deploy. We support 9 runtime and 15 managed service containers. With that flexibility, there are a vast number of frameworks and patterns across programming languages our users want to give a spin on our platform.

Providing documentation, let alone ready-to-deploy examples that always work, became the biggest problem at the heart of our DX struggles. Any chance we had to connect with a developer ends the moment example code fails to deploy correctly. Problem is, we had nearly 100 of these codebases that needed attention and a long-term maintenance plan. This talk describes the Platform.sh template journey.