GitHub engineers use a Gundam model analogy to explain the difference between product and platform engineering roles.Platform engineers provide tools and support for building products, while product engineers construct the final product.GitHub's platform engineering team shifted from addressing external customer issues to internal ones, requiring a new approach.Understanding the domain, networking fundamentals, infrastructure as code, and distributed systems are key for solving platform problems.Knowledge sharing and collaboration among engineers play a crucial role in problem-solving and innovation.Platform changes can have a wide impact radius, requiring thorough monitoring, telemetry, and postmortems to assess and address impacts.Testing changes in a distributed environment like GitHub involves infrastructure as code, end-to-end testing, and ensuring self-healing capabilities.Implementing changes host-by-host allows for individual rollback and prevents unaffected hosts from being impacted.GitHub's platform engineering work is crucial for ensuring smooth operations and faster, more reliable product delivery for developers.Continuous improvement and testing are essential for maintaining a healthy platform and meeting customer needs.