Cortex

What makes an internal tool truly valuable? Canva’s team breaks down ROI, developer joy, operational excellence, and their journey from a homegrown Backstage setup to Cortex.

One of the major but underdiscussed takeaways from the recent DORA report is the importance of investing in your foundations. AI is an amplifier as Nathen Harvey puts so succinctly – it makes the things you're good at better, and turns your org's weaknesses into even more of a bottleneck. A simple example of this is if your long CI builds are leading to a review pileup on senior ICs, no surprise, more PRs is going make this even worse! Don't think about improving your engineering workflow in a Before AI and After AI lens – focus on your existing bottlenecks and just make those better. The results will come. Full episode in the comments!

Stop babysitting an open‑source framework. Unlock the IDP results you always expected.

Outreach replaced spreadsheets and guesswork with real-time tracking with Cortex's IDP. By monitoring 100+ services at once, they proactively supported teams, eliminated migration stress, and provided leadership with confident, accurate updates. No fire drills required.

Sorry Tyler for the horrible AI image but there were so many great lessons in today's podcast episode that I had to turn it into a classroom setting! Some takeaways: - Internal tools for developers should spark joy - Focus on your core competencies – don't build things that don't produce unique value for your org - Dev tools and platforms should provide leverage points for the org - Scorecards are key for an IDP – they turn IDPs from data platforms to action Listen to the podcast, linked in the comments below for more insights!