Thinking about building a platform team? Then you know that’s no easy task. At PlatformCon @Eran Bibi - gofirefly.io will share his insights on How to build a successful Platform Engineering team and give you some of his best tricks, don’t miss it!

Hi everyone!, I'm doing a little research on the different flavours of

Engineering Productivity

in the industry, I found a lot of different ways to call groups with similar goals ( of course with a lot of nuances as it depends on company size, maturity, etc )

Developer Tools ( Auth0, Facebook )
Engineering Productivity ( Google, Pinterest, Gitlab )
Developer productivity ( Airbnb, Zalando )
Productivity Engineering ( Spotify, Netflix )
Engineering Effectiveness ( Twitter )
Developer Efficiency ( Datadog )

The issue with the examples above ☝️ is that those represent only a very small percentage of the industry, I'm interested on the other maybe 99% ( loving this post from Jean Yang https://future.a16z.com/software-development-building-for-99-developers/ ) How do you call

the team

doing this kind of work in your company? Do you see

Platform Engineering

as one of the branches of

Engineering Productivity

?, or do you see it as independent discipline? 🧵

Hey folks, Don’t shoot me but I want to talk about a favourite topic: infrastructure maintenance - backups, security, upgrades, updates, patches, EOL, etc. I think you get the picture. I’m looking for feedback (as open and honest as possible) for some product development that I’m working on related to this - it has a lot to do with the culture at different orgs as to how it’s tackled. There’s a lot of smart people here with valuable opinions (whether you love or loathe infra maintenance) and I’d appreciate a chance to grab a 10-minute virtual coffee break to ask a few questions. Would anyone be game? Feel free to reply here or DM me. (The break will be virtual, but I can take care of your coffee for real ☕)

Life on a battlefield 🔪? @Galo Navarro, Principal Software Engineer Midokura and long time contributor of the Platform Engineering community, always delivers great platform insights in powerful and hilarious slides. He wrote an article back in 2020 where he illustrated the life for a Platform team like 👇 Working in Platform teams? Ever felt this way before? 🙃

From my learnings thus far, the term “_*maintenance*_” is an absolutely massive turnoff when chatting to people - usually followed by a sigh and blank stare. How do you label maintenance tasks in your own teams? Do they have any other names? The “I’d Prefer Not To Wake Up At 3am” tasks? Thoughts?

Have you ever faced the feeling that despite all the hard work you and your team do, management doesn't understand the value you're providing? 🤔 At PlatformCon Jessica Ulyate, Product Lead at HelloFresh will give a talk about how to identify the value your team provides and what you can start doing today to best deliver your value proposition to management. 😉

Hey folks - the fun question of how else you would label good old boring “*maintenance*” has been an interesting thread. I really appreciate everyone who shared their feedback and got involved so far. I’ve been collating the ideas and responses received from multiple Slack workspaces and the data shows that there are a few common themes - I’m wondering what you think of the top ones? For context, we’re launching an initiative that focuses on taking a preventative and proactive approach to maintenance. We embrace the fact that we can’t make it sexy, we’re not trying to cover that up but rather looking for a phrase which grabs attention and is less of a turnoff. Basically I’m looking for a way to get people to talk to me about this subject. “Hey, I’d love to talk you about XYZ.” If you have time, I’d love to know which names stand out to you (and fit the bill). 1️⃣ Reliability Engineering 2️⃣ Operational Sustainment 3️⃣ Technical Health 4️⃣ Preventative Maintenance 5️⃣ Operations Engineering 6️⃣ Sustainability Engineering

According to Yishai Beeri, Cycle Time is probably the most underrated and least understood metric in engineering. Yet this is the metric that comprises the most important aspects to measure in your engineering process. In his talk at PlatformCon, Yishai (CTO at LinearB) will share his insights on Cycle Time and will prove that if you game this metric, you will realize huge gains for your entire dev process and engineering organization.

Hey folks! How are you naming the sub teams in your DevOps/ platform engineering organization? I am curious to know how they are grouped: by a specific platform they support or by a technology stack or something else. Obviously, you can't have dozen engineers do everything. So what is your way of classification/topology to keep the subteams focused and how do you measure success?

Sharing an article I wrote on how we are Applying Product Thinking to Slack’s Internal Compute Platform as it feels quite relevant to this group. Could not decide which channel fit it better so I went with this one 🤷

On June 9th George Hantzaras will discuss his key learnings on when, how, and why to build your first platform team. George will show how to market the rollout of a platform internally, while ensuring optimal interactions between product teams and avoid conflicts 🙅

@Becky Pauley is about to give some first-hand tips for everyone managing junior 👶 platform engineers. All the peaks and troughs were captured along the way as Becky was a brand new junior engineer herself just a year and a half ago. 🛣️ In this talk she will cover: • Where we’re going: The power and importance of objectives in setting a direction. • How we get there: Maximising learning opportunities and development with the tools you already have. • How we know how we’re doing: Effective (and ineffective) feedback. • An aside: empathy is underrated.

THE day has come 😛latformcon:, we are making history today 📜. Welcome to the first ever PlatformCon! I hope to see you all during the kick-offs. Don’t forget to say hi in the comments. 🙂 Please find all the useful links for day 1️⃣ here in one place, so you don’t get lost 🙂 • • Talks to watch on demand or by tracks: ◦ Platform Stories ◦ Platform Tech ◦ Platform Design ◦ Platform Culture • Recommended paths: Fundamentals, Advanced, Management. • Have any questions? Reach out to support@platformcon.com or DM me or @Luca Galante Enjoy the (recordings) ride and make the most of this conference! 🙂

Hi @Paula Kennedy. When you talk about reducing cognitive load, how to meet a good balance? So that devs don’t feel under challenged at some time. Or have the feeling that abstractions not only hide complexity but also the ability to dive really deep.

Hello all!

Hi everyone! Happy to answer any questions related to my talk, How to convince management to invest in your platform, or anything else really 😄

👋 I’m around today to answer any questions related to the talk (or incidents in general!) Hope y’all are enjoying the conference

Good morning. Good afternoon. Looking forward to comments and feedback. Steve

Good day, @Paula Kennedy . Not a question, just wanted to say that your talk was great! Thank you for such an informative one 🙌

I'd love to discuss your thoughts on the talk I gave discussing incentives and their affect on our psychology! I'll open a thread here for the psychopathy talk.

Hey everyone! Hope you enjoyed my talk on the stream, or on demand. Happy to answer any questions you might have! 😄 https://platformcon.com/talk/autonomy-or-chaos-how-to-scale-platforms-in-high-growth-companies

@Michael Wood You are throwing around words you know nothing about. Just because someone hurts your feelings does not mean they are pschyopaths or sociopaths.

@Jelmer Borst thanks for the great insights on how Picnic builds and maintains platforms. You mentioned a very specific example the

picnic-support-modules

. For such a centralized piece of software or feature of your platform. What processes or workflows do you have in place to decide if a certain feature should be maintained by the different product teams or be handed over to the central support module? How does this decision process look like at Picnic (also with respect to the principle of aligned autonomy).

Hey everyone! Hope you enjoyed my talk on how environments can help developers accelerate and scale the impact of the devops team. Happy to answer any questions you might have! https://platformcon.com/talk/stop-sacrificing-speed-for-infrastructure-planning

Hi @Michael Wood. Thanks for the talk and the book recommendation 🐍 in Suits; can you give more examples how to empower people not to hide away anymore in hierarchical enterprise org structures?

Good day @Jessica Ulyate! In your talk (it’s great!), you touched on platform KPIs and how to measure platform success. @Andrew Fong too. Are there certain frameworks or materials you know how to break down company goals into platform success metrics? Or what’s your view on this in general?

Yesterday we had a great session with our first keynote speaker @Gregor . Today we have our second keynote master - @Nigel Kersten (Field CTO at Puppet). Happy to have him here! 🤗 Nigel will give a talk about Platform Engineering as a (de facto) success factor in approaching DevOps at scale. He will also cover some successful and unsuccessful IT models, a short history of attempts to model DevOps, and cover some possible ideas for models we could adopt. I’m sure you’ll have some questions for Nigel, so make sure you tag him here in this channel and ask anything!

hey everyone! I know that was a short sharp talk, happy to go into detail on any of it with folks 🙂 I’ll be hanging out all day

(and am generally logged into this slack most of the time anyway)