Adventures in DevOps

Building Engineering Excellence with Ganesh Datta of Cortex - DevOps 239


Listen Later

In this episode, I (flying solo today!) sat down with Ganesh Datta, the CTO and co-founder of Cortex, to explore what it really means to drive engineering excellence at scale. And spoiler: it’s not just about better dashboards or fancy developer tools—it’s about treating software development like the competitive advantage it is.

We went deep into the why behind internal developer portals (IDPs) and how they’re transforming platform engineering, developer experience, and organizational maturity. Ganesh shares how Cortex came to life—from being paged at 2am for a mystery Game of Thrones-named microservice (yep, we've all been there), to realizing that every other business function had a system of record—except engineering.

Key Takeaways:
  • IDPs are like CRMs for Engineering: Just as sales teams wouldn’t function without a CRM, modern engineering orgs shouldn’t be flying blind without a structured, centralized developer portal.
  • Engineering Excellence = Business Outcomes: Whether it’s reliability, security, or platform efficiency, IDPs help codify best practices and align teams toward measurable goals.
  • Start Small to Win Big: You don’t need to overhaul everything on day one. Start with a pain point you already know—like production readiness—and improve that incrementally.
  • SREs and Platform Engineers Love IDPs: Because it gives them the data, ownership visibility, and real-time checks they need, without the honor-system chaos.
  • Developer Experience is Just the Beginning: Tools like Cortex aren’t just about dev productivity—they’re about creating resilient, aligned, scalable engineering orgs.
We also geeked out about everything from naming services (“Brewer” for a feature extraction tool? Chef’s kiss.) to the surprising power of reading 15 minutes before bed to improve sleep quality—yep, we went there!

If you’re part of an engineering team (or leading one) and want to know how to move faster and smarter, this is the episode for you.
...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Adventures in DevOpsBy Will Button, Warren Parad

  • 4.4
  • 4.4
  • 4.4
  • 4.4
  • 4.4

4.4

18 ratings


More shows like Adventures in DevOps

View all
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers by se-radio@computer.org

Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

272 Listeners

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source by Changelog Media

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

283 Listeners

The Cloudcast by Massive Studios

The Cloudcast

152 Listeners

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast by Thoughtworks

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

42 Listeners

Talk Python To Me by Michael Kennedy

Talk Python To Me

591 Listeners

Software Engineering Daily by Software Engineering Daily

Software Engineering Daily

627 Listeners

Soft Skills Engineering by Jamison Dance and Dave Smith

Soft Skills Engineering

272 Listeners

Go Time: Golang, Software Engineering by Changelog Media

Go Time: Golang, Software Engineering

128 Listeners

AWS Podcast by Amazon Web Services

AWS Podcast

203 Listeners

JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development by Changelog Media

JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development

91 Listeners

Kubernetes Podcast from Google by Abdel Sghiouar, Kaslin Fields

Kubernetes Podcast from Google

181 Listeners

DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling by Bret Fisher

DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling

55 Listeners

DevOps Paradox by Darin Pope & Viktor Farcic

DevOps Paradox

24 Listeners

The Stack Overflow Podcast by The Stack Overflow Podcast

The Stack Overflow Podcast

64 Listeners

The Real Python Podcast by Real Python

The Real Python Podcast

140 Listeners