Developing software is like the workings of a bustling kitchen, where elaborate dishes are crafted using exotic ingredients, skillfully handled by chefs wielding their tools with precision. Imagine, however, that amidst all the activity there's a big problem: the talented master chefs are spending most of their time on mundane tasks like peeling potatoes and chopping onions. Shackled by these repetitive chores, the chefs are unable to showcase their culinary artistry and their frustrations run hot.

Backend developers regularly face a similar predicament. In reality, development time is mostly spent on basic repetitive tasks like microservices boilerplate and YAML, mocking services for local development, handling secrets, and dozens of other activities unrelated to the actual product being created. These activities offer little room for creativity and provide no unique benefit to the end product. Yet, developers are stuck in this endless slog of repetitive work, making it impossible to focus on what truly matters – creating exceptional software to benefit end-users.

Frustratingly, these tasks can often account for 80% of the entire development process, leaving a mere morsel of time and energy for creative and truly differentiating work that contributes to setting a product apart in the market.

But wait, it gets worse! As teams scale they eventually reach a breaking point in productivity. Conflicting development work highlights the need for separate development environments, and growing systems complexity exposes the need for improved observability. This pushes many teams to take on an even bigger distraction: investing in building a developer platform. This often consists of patching together various products and services, with many months and quarters being stolen away from focused product development, and an end-result requiring developers to learn new tools and processes.

In this reality, the opportunity is clear: how do we free the potential of developers and help them focus on creative work that delivers differentiated product value?

Enter Encore, the sous-chef of the backend development world – here to liberate developers from peeling potatoes! Encore is an end-to-end development platform, allowing teams to immediately shift focus from repetitive undifferentiated tasks, to instead focus on creative work that drives innovation and product value.

Encore provides an API framework, that lets developers avoid microservices boilerplate, and a cloud-agnostic Infrastructure SDK for declaring infrastructure requirements directly in application code. When using these, Encore automates infrastructure provisioning in local, preview, and cloud environments, instruments the application with distributed tracing and logging, provides metrics and generates API documentation and frontend clients.

Embracing Encore is more than just adopting a new tool, it's an invitation to join a journey towards transforming software development. Together, we can champion creativity, efficiency, and ultimately, the success of our development teams.