DevOps Meetup #85: Platform Engineering & Engineering Management

Welcome to our meetup where we explore and share DevOps values, practices, and culture.

This meetup is organized together with Cloud Native Porto and AWS UG Porto, and will be hosted by Critical Manufactoring.

Talk #1
Collaboration Hub - Cloud Development Environments powering Project performance

Summary
We're sharing our journey building Cloud Development Environments (DevBoxes) for multi-organizational collaboration in Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES).
The Challenge: Managing development across Critical Manufacturing teams, partner developers, and customer developers — all with different hardware, security policies, and network constraints — while multiple MES projects run simultaneously (different factories, different versions).
Our Solution: Cloud-based DevBoxes with:

• Devcontainers for version isolation
• VS Code Server for browser-based development
• Unified OIDC authentication with automatic token rotation
• Observability-first architecture

The Impact: Developer onboarding dropped from 3–5 days to less than an hour. Teams can now transition between projects seamlessly, regardless of location or organizational boundaries.
Join us for a 30-minute deep dive into how we’re reducing onboarding time using DevContainers and remote development. We’ll cover motivations, key architecture decisions, a quick workflow/demo (from onboarding to PR), and challenges faced when keeping environments reliable and secure at scale.

Speakers

• César Meira, Principal Software Engineer | R&D Area @ Critical Manufacturing (LinkedIn)
• Marco Silva, Principal Software Engineer | R&D Area @ Critical Manufacturing (LinkedIn)

Talk #2
Management is a Hard Job. That’s Why You Should Do It Like an Engineer

Summary
When engineers move into management, they often feel like they’ve entered a chaotic, ambiguous world that no longer rewards their technical instincts. But what if the same principles that make systems reliable could also make teams successful?
In this talk, William explores how to manage like an engineer — designing human systems with the same rigor we apply to distributed ones. He’ll cover how to:

• Build autonomous, observable teams that don’t depend on micromanagement
• Apply system design thinking to managing up, down, and across
• Use metrics, feedback loops, and postmortems to improve trust and delivery
• Treat communication breakdowns like outages — measurable, fixable, and preventable

You’ll walk away with practical, battle-tested methods to make leadership feel less like chaos and more like production engineering, because people systems deserve the same reliability as your infrastructure.

Speaker

• William Mendes, DevOps Team Lead @ Coralogix (Linkedin)

Agenda

• 18:30 - 19:00 Opening
• 19:00 - 19:30 Collaboration Hub - Cloud Development Environments powering Project Performance by César Meira and Marco Silva
• 19:30 - 20:00 Management is a Hard Job. That’s Why You Should Do It Like an Engineer by William Mendes
• 20:00 - 20:30 Networking

Location
Critical Manufacturing
R. Eng. Frederico Ulrich 2650, 4470-605 Moreira da Maia, Maia

Where to find us
Web: devopsporto.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/devopsporto
X: x.com/DevOpsPorto
Slack: devopsporto.slack.com

Calls
Organizers: tinyurl.com/callfororg
Proposals: tinyurl.com/callforprop