Travis is a Distinguished Software Engineer at SPS Commerce, the world's largest retail network, where he leads innovation, drives meaningful change, and amplifies team productivity. With a passion for technology and a talent for simplifying complex architectures, Travis focuses on creating seamless Developer Experiences and fostering high-performing teams. A seasoned speaker, architect, and blogger, he thrives on sharing insights, exploring emerging technologies, and championing impactful development practices.
Internal Developer Portals are revolutionizing how teams streamline workflows, enhance developer experience, and boost productivity. As AI begins to weave deeper into engineering workflows, having structured, reliable SDLC data becomes essential to unlock its full potential. But for medium-sized organizations with limited resources, the path to success is unclear and fraught with challenges. Simply mimicking or using industry frameworks like Spotify Backstage might seem like a shortcut, but without a clear vision and strategy, it can lead to frustration and failure.
This talk dives into how to build a successful Internal Developer Portal tailored to your unique needs. We'll explore critical steps: making a compelling business case, navigating the buy-versus-build dilemma, designing scalable architectures, driving adoption, and measuring impact in meaningful ways. Packed with actionable insights from SPS Commerce’s journey—the force behind the world’s largest retail network—you'll gain a roadmap to reduce cognitive load, empower your teams, and align your engineering practices with business goals. Whether you're starting fresh or refining an existing portal, this session will equip you to achieve big wins, even on a lean budget.
In an era where digital transformation and AI adoption are accelerating across every industry, the need for consistent, scalable, and robust APIs has never been more critical. AI-powered tools—whether generating code, creating documentation, or integrating services—rely heavily on clean, well-structured API specifications to function effectively. As teams grow and the number of APIs multiplies, maintaining design consistency becomes a foundational requirement not just for human developers, but also for enabling reliable, intelligent automation. This session explores how linting and reusable models can help teams meet that challenge at scale.
We will explore API linting using the open-source Spectral project to enable teams to identify and rectify inconsistencies during design. In tandem, we will navigate the need for reusable models—recognizing that the best specification is the one you don’t have to write or lint at all! These two approaches not only facilitate the smooth integration of services but also foster collaboration across teams by providing a shared, consistent foundation.
AI enablement isn’t buying Copilot and calling it done–it’s a system upgrade for the entire SDLC. Code completion helps, but the real bottlenecks live in reviews, testing, releases, documentation, governance, and knowledge flow. Achieving meaningful impact requires an operating model: guardrails, workflows, metrics, and change management; not a single tool.
This session shares SPS Commerce’s field notes: stories, failures, and working theories from enabling AI across teams. You’ll get a sampler of adaptable patterns and anti-patterns spanning productivity, systems integration, guardrails, golden repositories, capturing tribal knowledge, API design, platform engineering, and internal developer portals. Come for practical menus you can pilot next week—and stay to compare strategies with peers.