How to Know If You’re Building the Right Internal Tools

The New Stack Podcast

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Rob Skillington, co-founder and CTO of Chronosphere, discusses the challenges engineers face in building tools for their organizations. Skillington emphasizes that the "build or buy" decision oversimplifies the issue of tooling and suggests that understanding the abstractions of a project is crucial. Engineers should consider where to build and where to buy, creating solutions that address the entire problem. Skillington advises against short-term thinking, urging innovators to consider the long-term landscape.

Drawing from his experience at Uber, Skillington highlights the importance of knowing the audience and customer base, even when they are colleagues. He shares a lesson learned when building a visualization platform for engineers at Uber, where understanding user adoption as a key performance indicator upfront could have improved the project's outcome.

Skillington also addresses the "not invented here syndrome," noting its prevalence in organizations like Microsoft and its potential impact on tool adoption. He suggests that younger companies, like Uber, may be more inclined to explore external solutions rather than building everything in-house. The conversation provides insights into Skillington's experiences and the considerations involved in developing internal tools and platforms.

Learn more from The New Stack about Software Engineering, Observability, and Chronosphere:

Cloud Native Observability: Fighting Rising Costs, Incidents

A Guide to Measuring Developer Productivity

4 Key Observability Best Practices