2025-06-12 –, Side Stage - Cinema 6
What happens when you start treating your core devs as customers, and build out specialized tooling, platforms and processes to make their work easier and their lives better?
In this talk, I’ll share how the Platforms engineering team at OP Labs identified the pain points that Protocol devs face when working with the OP Stack (especially around testing and releases) and built dedicated devnets tooling, new E2E testing frameworks, and updated release pipelines to speed up our release cadence and improve our confidence in OP Stack releases and hardforks.
Last year, OP Labs launched a new initiative, focused on making the developer experience better for our own core devs. This effort fell under the auspices of our Platforms engineering team, which focuses on building the, well, platforms that our protocol engineers build on top of.
As the product lead for this initiative, I looked at what it means to treat protocol devs as users and customers. Through user research with protocol engineers, we identified the key pain points in testing, releases and our contribution process, and built new solutions to tackle them. We also borrowed ideas and tools from the ethPandaOps team, adapting and extending their approach to fit the OP Stack’s needs.
In this talk, I’ll explain how our approach to spinning up ephemeral devnets, revamping our testing approach, and rethinking our release pipeline has helped us reduce the friction that core devs face day to day. I’ll share some of the mistakes made and lessons learned—with takeaways on how anyone can apply these ideas to their own engineering teams and projects.
Tess leads product for the Platforms org at OP Labs. Previously, she was the crypto engineering lead at Twitter, and led engineering teams at Interchain GmbH and Chain.com.