From DevOps Engineer to Certified Platform Engineering Practitioner: My Journey, Lessons, Career Growth and Why You Should Invest in This Training

In September 2024, I made a decision that would redefine my career. After 7+ years of building and operating cloud infrastructure across Africa, I felt the limits of being “just” a DevOps engineer. I didn’t want to just manage pipelines or provision clusters — I wanted to architect the entire developer experience.

That’s when I enrolled in the Platform Engineering Certified Practitioner Course, part of the PlatformEngineering.org ecosystem.

This wasn’t just another certification. It was 8 weeks of high-impact training, with live lectures, hands-on labs, and direct access to global experts like Luca Galante, Paul Revello (Google), Manuel Pais (Team Topologies), Mallory Haigh (Humanitec), Ajay Chankramath, plus guest sessions from Sam Barlien and Tobias Kunze.

I absorbed everything Platform-as-a-Product thinking, golden path design, abstraction strategies, MVP-first delivery, and real-world IDP architectures.

I didn’t just want another badge, I wanted to master Platform-as-a-Product thinking and become the engineer leaders turn to when they need a platform that works at scale.

And then… I vanished.

For the next 10 months, I went off-grid; hibernating, not in rest, but in deep applied R&D. I rebuilt, experimented, broke, fixed, and iterated — applying every concept from the course to real-world architectures until I had battle-tested patterns that work at scale.

This is the story of that journey and why, if you’re serious about platform engineering, you should invest in this training.

Why I Took the Leap

Over the years, I saw a common pattern:

Developer onboarding was slow and painful, with increased cognitive load.
Infrastructure complexity grew faster than the team’s ability to manage it.
Internal tooling lacked ownership and long-term vision.

I wanted the skills to change that to design platforms as products that treat internal developers as customers and deliver continuous value, not just one-off automation.

I specifically sought:

A structured, real-world curriculum covering the entire platform lifecycle.
Deep exposure to MVP-first delivery for Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs).
Insights from global practitioners who have built successful platforms in production.
A framework I could apply immediately to client and open-source projects.

This program delivered all of that and more.

World-Class Mentorship from Industry Leaders

One of the most transformative aspects of the Certified Platform Engineering Practitioner program was learning directly from the people shaping the field. This wasn’t just theory from a slide deck — it was guidance from practitioners who have built, led, and scaled real-world platforms in the most demanding environments.

My mentors included:

Luca Galante – Core contributor at Platform Engineering, whose strategic insights on Platform-as-a-Product shifted how I think about developer experience and adoption ( you should subscribe to his platforms weekly newsletter).
Paul Revello – Staff Cloud Solutions Architect at Google, who brought deep architectural expertise and real-world cloud deployment lessons.
Manuel Pais – Co-author of Team Topologies, whose frameworks for team structures and platform ownership were immediately applicable in my own projects.
Mallory Haigh – Platform workshop host and “platform therapist” at Humanitec, who grounded every concept in practical developer enablement techniques, building platform MVPs and her analogy that stuck with me - treating your Internal developer platform as a Vending Machine.
Ajay Chankramath – Former Head of Platform Engineering at Thoughtworks, CTO at Brillo, who shared hard-earned strategies for scaling platforms in complex organizations.
Sam Barlien – Head of Ecosystem, who constantly connected each lesson to the broader platform engineering movement and was always supporting me.
Clemenss Jutte – my personal motivator and always ready to provide help and answers on slack, who provided sharp technical guidance on abstractions, tooling, and integration patterns on the PocketIDP and CNOE labs.

Every session mixed live lectures, in-session exercises, Q&A, and follow-up homework. The mentorship didn’t stop at class time — our private Slack channel meant I could discuss challenges and get direct feedback from these leaders and peers across the globe.

By the end, I had a direct mental toolkit from some of the brightest minds in the field — and a professional network I still collaborate with today.

Inside the Curriculum: 8 Weeks That Changed Everything

The Platform Engineering Certified Practitioner Course isn’t just a playlist of pre-recorded lectures — it’s a blend of on-demand learning and live, interactive sessions that demand you apply concepts immediately. Over 8 weeks, the curriculum wove together the cultural principles and technical architectures that define modern platform engineering.

Each week followed a rhythm: ✅ 1-hour live Zoom session (lecture, in-session work, Q&A, homework) ✅ Optional extra study hour for homework, reading, and tool deep dives ✅ All sessions recorded, with private Slack for ongoing Q&A and peer support

And yes — my favorite part of the entire program? The hands-on Platform Engineering course labs. We had access to a Cloud Development Environment where we could build and run practical Internal Developer Platforms and design golden paths in real time. It wasn’t theory — it was live, in-browser experimentation where mistakes were part of the learning.

Here’s how my learning unfolded:

Module 1 – Intro to Platform Engineering We began by anchoring the core concepts:

Why platform engineering has emerged as a discipline
How it differs from DevOps and SRE
The skills you actually need to thrive in this space By the end, I could clearly articulate platform engineering’s value to both developers and executives — a skill that has since helped me sell platform initiatives internally.

Module 2 – How to Build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) This was where Platform-as-a-Product really clicked for me. We dissected architectural patterns, compared front-end vs back-end designs, and walked through reference architectures. I left this module with my first MVP IDP blueprint ready for experimentation.

Module 3 – Platform Tooling 101 We got hands-on. Two full IDP examples:

Open source: Backstage + ArgoCD, built with CNOE
Vendor-based: A Platform Orchestrator-powered stack These labs were my introduction to composable platform tooling, and they directly informed how I later integrated Humanitec with Score for workload abstraction.

Module 4 – The Art of Building Golden Paths Golden paths are the lifeblood of developer experience. We learned how to design them, avoid “golden cages,” and measure their impact on developer productivity. In the sandbox labs, I built my first working golden path from scratch — complete with automated environment provisioning and CI/CD integration.

Module 5 – Finding the Right Abstractions This was the moment I realized how abstractions are the glue that holds a platform together. We explored front-end and back-end abstractions, tying them back to golden paths, and examined how the right level of abstraction empowers developers without hiding too much complexity. In the lab, I built a reusable workload definition that could be deployed to multiple environments with zero YAML rewrites — a direct precursor to how I now design Score specs.

Module 6 – Infrastructure Platform Engineering Here we zoomed in on the API design principles for platforms. We tackled the “vending machine” model of infrastructure provisioning and balanced separation of concerns with cross-cutting needs like security and compliance. The labs here were a game-changer: I automated environment provisioning as code, applying infrastructure modules in a fully GitOps-driven workflow.

Module 7 – How to Build Your Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) This was the culmination of everything we’d learned so far. We worked through the MVP framework, building just enough platform to deliver value early, while leaving space to iterate. My sandbox project here — an MVP IDP serving a microservices app with golden path deployments — became the foundation for my real-world Humanitec + Score platform rollout months later.

Module 8 – Selling Your MVP to Key Stakeholders Even the best platform fails if no one adopts it. In this final module, we learned to speak the language of developers, security teams, and executives, each with tailored messaging. We built ROI models and business cases, and I practiced pitching my MVP — a skill I’ve since used in actual stakeholder presentations with measurable success.

What Happened Next

Graduating from the program wasn’t an ending — it was ignition.

Armed with the strategies, architectures, and mindsets I had absorbed from Luca, Manuel, Paul, Mallory, Ajay, Sam, Tobias, and the rest of the teaching team, I made a bold move:

I hibernated.

I went off-grid for the next 10 months — quite literally. As an African engineer, I had long learned to prepare for uninterrupted focus. Months earlier, I had invested my savings into a 24/7 solar power inverter system and Starlink internet, giving me the infrastructure to work without relying on the unpredictable grid.

Then I quit every other task, job, or distraction. No side gigs. No client firefighting. No context switching. Just deep, deliberate practice.

During this period, I turned my certification into a living, breathing platform blueprint:

From Mallory’s MVP lessons → I went on to build actual MVP platform offerings and the golden paths to support them — enabling engineers to go from zero to delivering production-ready value in few days to weeks, instead of months.
From Manuel’s “Team Topologies” lessons → Restructured platform ownership models to reduce friction and accelerate delivery cycles.
From Luca’s Platform-as-a-Product mindset → Built graph-based Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) powered by orchestrators like Humanitec, focusing on developer outcomes instead of infrastructure checklists.
From Paul’s cloud architecture guidance → Delivered multi-cloud IDP reference architectures across AWS, GCP, Azure, and OpenShift for resilient, flexible deployments.
From Ajay’s scaling and AI strategies → Implemented Score Specification–driven workload abstractions that worked across diverse teams and tech stacks.
And shoutout to Sam Barlien for all the support and one-on-one assistance and mentorship.

Applying It: From Certification to Tangible Results

Certification was the start — the transformation came in the 10 months after:

Built Graph-based IDPs powered by Humanitec for dynamic workload orchestration.
Implemented Score Specification for abstracting deployment definitions across environments.
Integrated Terraform/OpenTofu for consistent infrastructure provisioning.
Designed multi-cloud IDP blueprints for AWS, GCP, Azure, and OpenShift.
Contributed tutorials and open-source examples at cloudikeme.com and Build Platforms Daily Blog.

These weren’t side projects — they solved real onboarding, productivity, and scalability problems for engineering teams.

Why This Matters to Engineering Leaders

If you lead engineering, platform, or DevOps teams, here’s why this training is ROI-positive:

Accelerates Platform Maturity
Teams stop reinventing the wheel and start delivering value within weeks.
Shifts to Developer Outcomes
No more “infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake” — platforms are built with measurable developer happiness.
Reduces Time-to-Market
MVP-first delivery ensures every iteration solves a real need.
Retains Top Talent
Engineers thrive when friction is low and tools empower, not frustrate.

My Recommendation

The next cohort of the Certified Practitioner Course is open.
If you’re serious about building platforms that last, take this step.

Engineers: It will sharpen your skills and shift how you see your role.
Leaders: It will give your teams the blueprint for sustainable, scalable platforms.

🔗 Learn more and register here

Final Thought:
In platform engineering, tools change, clouds evolve — but the product mindset is forever.
This course gave me the framework to build platforms that don’t just run… they deliver.