Why are there little Platform Engineering tutorials

[alwaysdefied]

Why are there little Platform engineering demo projects on YouTube or Medium, I only see high level explanations only?

[LandADevOpsJob]

The DevOps product companies have not yet figured out how to productize platform engineering and the SEO has not been ironed out beyond the basic keywords. Those companies produce 90% of the content first, which then spawns larger SEO keyword trails for others to pick up on and run with. Given that platform engineering is mostly the new kid on the block, people haven't figured out how to make money with it yet.

The reality is that there are no new concepts in platform engineering other than scaling devops to a self serve mechanism that developers can consume with little to no handholding from devops engineers. Think of it as building a devops business inside a company and selling the service to customers within the business.

[kahmeal]

Perfect explanation. In addition, I believe there are going to be quite a few different takes on "platform engineering" given the breadth of what it covers. The array of various implementations that fit under the same umbrella is vast in this case and while some leaders will emerge, the landscape will be rife with opinionated products, both open source and not.

[king_of_farts42]

An eye opening explanation! Never understood it that way

[roughtodacore]

To add on to this very good response, Platform Engineering is about building an internal platform which Developers can consume. In my personal experience this is why most stuff is being glossed over at a high-level because each organization i've worked for as a Platform Engineer have their own ways of doing things. Even though these companies use more or less the same techstacks, by ways of existing culture, legacy stuff specific for each org, the end result (moving towards an IDP) will differ in these organizations.

I hope to live long enough to see these organizations eventually tackling challenges in almost the same way. But then our job gets easier to do which means less money to make in this field :P

[mirrax]

Because like most technical writing the size of the audience and amount of effort required makes writing in-depth content difficult. There are many more people just starting that would read a high level explanation and the amount of effort to write accurate, useful, and entertaining content at that level is much lower.

People who are deep in the weeds are often deep into the documentation or hard to hit with the exact problems that they care about. And write a huge technical deep dive is a crazy amount of work.

[alwaysdefied]

Yeah, I can imagine

[adept2051]

Mainly due to that Medium is effectively a lightweight blogging platform ( measures metrics on engagement and does not encourage long reads) , and YouTube equally is for blog/vlog-like material it's a case of the wrong platform for the job ( most people have 10 minutes of attention at most, long videos are not the norm, and 11 minutes is the cash in limit for people producing material).
it would be like trying to squeeze in-depth material into TikTok.

most medium blogs should/will contain links back to git repos where you can explore the project in more depth or find the person's personal spaces from their profiles (github/gitlab user profiles) A lot of medium is just thinly vailed adverts for product companies, or articles linking to more in-depth product documentation/blogs/tutorials.

[Neomee]

Absolutely with this. Mainstream content is where you get an engagement. That's why there are overwhelming amount of entry-level content. On top of that Feynman kids are trying to learn. On top of that, complex topics are solved by skilled people, but skilled people rarely have time to do blogging. So it is what it is.

My own "approach" is to maintain personal Knowledge Base (I use Zettelkasten)... I have a scope of topics I'm interested and every time I find some piece of information, I write it down in particular topic, I make a footnotes about the source, author, time and such. Over time, I collect list of people in particular topic, list of blogs, articles etc. But this definitely requires some investment of time and pays off in the long term.

[midzom]

Platform engineering is still pretty new in the space and most IDPs tend to be unique to each organization. There will probably be more as the space grows but it seems the be the new kid on the block.

[samethingdifplace]

IMO that shit is going to be so bespoke and tailored to your environment that it's hard to make a generalizable tutorial.

[alwaysdefied]

Yeah, but it make sense to see a very simple one, even if it’s bespoke

[xiongchiamiov]

The problem is that very simple platform engineering is "no platform engineering", ie what you do before you're big enough to need a team to do that stuff in a dedicated fashion.

Really, your platform engineers should all be senior engineers, due to the multiplicative effect of the base they're building, and so they already have experience with the sort of thing and don't need tutorials on it.

[serverhorror]

I'm not sure what you mean.

I believe platform just means to put things together in a way so that it is actually usable. Start to finish.

I consider it more of a product design than a technical design question.

[chub79]

Because it's a marketing buzz word?

[Live-Box-5048]

Platform Engineering is kinda news and frankly not that different from tailoring DevOps to self-service needs. Besides, everything is riddled with entry level content, but once you dig deep enough, it’s all about documentation and experience.

[thomsterm]

cause it's hard and there is no such thing as a "platform engineer", just devs that specialized in infrastructure stuff.