PlatformCon2025

After a nice walk though London city, I arrived at the st.Paul’s Convene, a great location for the current size of PlatformCon (I do hope they’ll grow even bigger and more important in the near future).

The conference opened with a nice breakfast, beautifully displayed for all participants

But let's take a flashback to the evening before.

Tuesday 17:00 local time, a meeting started. People from all over the world gathered around a round table to talk about platform engineering and A.I., and the platform as a whole, facilitated by the people from Thoughtworks and PlatformCon.

Honestly every conclusion in this relay is my own, since we kept the discussion open and never drove to any settlement.

We spoke about quite a few topics. 2 Still remain fresh in my mind.

The last one was about how to deal with teams that don’t wish to follow the path set out by the platform teams.

I couldn’t escape the notion this was either a forced hypothesis or in a startup (perhaps a scale-up), the organisation wasn’t that well explained but in my opinion in those lifecycle stadiums of an organisation you don’t need a platform. The next day I would learn from another participant in the same room that some startups definitely need a platform, this is because they extensively work with huge amounts of data and calculations on that data that need to be handled by data scientists.

But, in the first phase of an organisation you generally don’t need a platform, yes you’ll need an environment, be it your favorite cloud provider or your own. It's just, the costs are too high for the startup. The startup needs to go fast , push out new features or products like there’s no tomorrow.

Then later the organisation needs to start thinking about and implementing guardrails. Don’t forget a platform isn’t cheap, let alone the endeavor to build one, but at one point the platform will start to provide a return on investment that makes it a necessity. When that is? I don’t know exactly. But when I talk about one of my own clients idea of growing 200 new personnel each month, it was way overdue. Adding more people to the organisation is definitely a scalability issue of the highest order. Not only for that particular enterprise but also for the market as a whole (the enterprise sucks all the professional out of the market).

The other topic was about A.I.. What’s interesting is that a lot of times it’s the business that tells the developers to use A.I., because why? Don’t know.

Jokes aside, often the idea is to remain competitive. We did get the advice to steer away from the cost competitive argumentation. Go for the question the organisation really needs solved and then cost goals will be achieved because of that.

The main day.

The main stage started with a panel. Very insightful and I want to give you this quote from Richey Zachery: `With platformengineering we’re building developer success teams`.

From that moment onward I proceeded to my first workshop: improving ci/cd pipelines. I didn’t like that one. It felt more like a sales pitch and for that I’d go to the booths in the central area.

Speaking of which, there were some excellent companies at those booths. It was easy to engage with them and not all of them were there to do their sales. I had some pretty good conversations that gave me good ideas for my plans with the platformteam at Cohesion.

Anyway, me leaving the workshop early lead me to a chance meeting the exellent Ana Bogdan. We started to discus the previous evening’s meeting and we came down on some conclusions I came up with. I hope she liked my explanations and arguments because she immediately invited me to another (smaller sized) table discussion session. So how could I decline? The prior evening session gave me already great insights, so would probably give me another batch, right? 

It would require me to miss out on some other session, but hey that’s why we went to this event with a small delegation. Dilyano would have to take those honeurs.

In the meantime before the table session, it was time for lunch, to which I must give great kudos. Well fabricated selection of vegan and non-vegan bites.

Afterwards another session about CDE (cloud development environment) that I don’t like to integrate in an IDP. Those things make me feel like with an earlier attempt in the early 0s. Boy am I glad I’m no longer forced to work with WSAD or Vscode for that matter. I strongly believe the developer experience should augment the developers’ preferred workflow and not restrict it. A developer’s workflow (when one is more experienced) has oftentimes evolved around a set of tools according to the preferences of said developer.

Then the table session started and we discussed topics like difficulties for dataengineering, how to deal with finding the right items/topics to find for an IDP. A nice takeaway is that at some point RFCs no longer work, the scale of the enterprise is just too big and the RFCs deal with matters that is not really the problem that an IDP does need to solve. Does this coincide with when a company grows in the size when an IDP becomes a thing (just a curiosity of mine now)? It is better to do surveys and interviews with your developers to collect the adjustments needed.

And finally the topic on, what kind of persons does one need to search for the development team of an IDP. Something we at Cohesion are trying to find out as well.

I must commend Sam and Ana for creating a healthy environment with such fruitful discussions. And,,, I hope to see more like these in the coming PlatformCons.

Lastly, my encounter with Cornelia Davis from Temporal. She and I spoke on something about measurement on the ci/cd pipelines. What we’re lacking is metrics inside the whole pipeline. Vendors like github and gitlab are great but they don’t give us much insights about the jobs we’re running, and where we could improve on those (this was the stuff I wanted to deal with during the work I prematurely left by another vendor). We should push these vendors to allow for (at least) hooks to examine those metrics.

To end this relay: I loved PlatformCon2025, I hope to see you next year.