Speaker
Abstract
Technical concepts are something that are thought of, approached, and understood differently across engineers, managers, and executives. Bridging the gaps and providing understanding to a complex and nuanced topic across all three groups can sometimes feel impossible. In this talk, we'll do just that.
Together, we're going to go over not just platforms and platform engineering, but the very fabric of doing, what it means to learn, and how collective thought scales across a team, an organization and an industry. Utilizing that, we'll go over platform engineering from the perspectives of an engineer, a manager, and an executive. All at the same time.
Not only will we go over a consistent framework for how each group can think about and understand platform engineering, we'll spend time going over how each group can communicate with other and understand each other in a way that's effective, actionable, and transformative.
Interview
The focus of my work, when distilled into a single question, is the everlasting pursuit of understanding the question: "What does fast, effective flow look like at the scale of humanity, and what does it mean to build a sociotechnical system that enables people to reach their fullest potential?"
This question has vastly different considerations to me when asked at the level of the IC, the team, the vertical, the organization, and the industry; consequently, much of my challenges revolve around trying to find that multiplicative set of actions that align the various scopes of influence, direction, interest, and motivation. Additionally, it's my opinion that we, as a social species, are still extremely immature when it comes to understanding how we truly learn, how we share ideas with each other, and how we grow in healthy and sustainable ways. "What does fast, effective flow" look like at the scale of an entire humanity is not something we are prepared to even visualize, but it is an idea that consumes me.
I find myself pondering what a platform is quite often. What does it mean for something to be a platform, what does it mean for a platform to be high leverage, and what makes them that way? I want to present what I think are some, hopefully, compelling answers to these questions and open up a dialogue into what it really means to be a platform engineering team, and how we define self-excellence when much of the goal is centered around multiplying the value of others.
The persona of this audience will be a tri-headed beast, because that is how I could currently best be described. I have spent the last while simultaneously operating at the Director level, the Engineering Manager level, and the Individual Contributor level. Balancing all three perspectives is... Difficult. That difficulty will be present here.
This talk is for someone who views executive alignment as one of their biggest drivers of value. It is also for someone who is seeking to understand how they might lead without authority and influence the growth of a nascent platform. It is also for someone who wants to know how they might go about building a platform, get that buy-in, and have a roadmap to pursuing this even when being an IC.
For those who pursue executive alignment: This talk will drive home how necessary it is to get the correct type of alignment and to avoid dragging the leadership team into decision paralysis or split-brain messaging.
For those who seek to lead without authority: This talk will hopefully give you the understanding of what conversations to initiate when pushing messaging up, as well as how to effectively get buy-in up and down the management ladder simultaneously.
For those who are an IC seeking to build a platform: This talk will provide a blueprint and set of mental models for thinking about, planning, and executing on platforms.
Topics
QCon San Francisco 2023 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Platform Engineering Done Well Hosted by Daniel Bryant Platform Engineer, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture", Java Champion, and InfoQ News ManagerFrom the same track
Tuesday 3 October
10:35 Ballroom A Session Platform Engineering Building a Successful Platform: Acceleration, Autonomy & Accountability Smruti Patel SVP of Engineering @apollographql Do we build a greenfield platform or do we incrementally centralize common foundations? Do we abstract away all complexity or provide upfront knobs and handles for composability? 11:45 Ballroom A Session Platform Engineering Understanding Platforms: What They Are, Why They Work, When to Use Them, How to Build Them Hazel Weakly Head of Infrastructure & Developer Experience; Director, Haskell Foundation; Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm Technical concepts are something that are thought of, approached, and understood differently across engineers, managers, and executives. Bridging the gaps and providing understanding to a complex and nuanced topic across all three groups can sometimes feel impossible. 13:35 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Platform Engineering Done Well What is an unconference? An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. Attendees come together, bringing their challenges and relying on the experience and know-how of their peers for solutions. 14:45 Ballroom A Session Platform Engineering Building Better Platforms with Empathy: Case Studies and Counter-Examples David Stenglein Solo Consultant @Missing Mass, LLC with Over 28 Years in Systems, Software, and Consulting Break out of traditional IT roles with your internal platform. Build a product based on customer empathy and real needs to achieve broad adoption. 15:55 Ballroom A Session Platform Engineering Effective Performance Engineering at Twitter-Scale Yao Yue Founder & Chief Executive Officer @IOP Systems, Platform Engineer, Distributed System Aficionado, Cache Expert Is performance engineering more craft than machinery? How do you scale something that seems to require both domain-specific context and comprehensive knowledge across multiple levels of the software and hardware stack? 17:05 Ballroom A Session Platform Engineering How to Get Tech-Debt on the Roadmap Ben Hartshorne Principal Engineer @Honeycomb, Building Operable Systems with Resilience and Business Value Only doing product-led work can lead to an unmaintainable system with lots of downtime. Unfortunately, getting time to work on the things that would prevent that can be challenging.