Building Engineering Excellence with Ganesh Datta of Cortex - DevOps 239

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.