Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly bite into the crossianty goodness that is platform engineering. We’re celebrating passing 100 weeks of Platform weekly. It’s crazy to think it’s been almost 2 years since I was in Paris, eating croissants and thinking about starting a platform engineering newsletter. Let’s see how far we’ve come. 

We’re looking at the first, the greatest, and the… not so greatest.

BTW - It’s your last chance to join the upcoming Platform Engineering Fundamentals course starting on Thursday, October 10th. So if you wanna join - join quick! We’ve got an awesome group together so far.

I can’t wait to get started.

A lot has changed since that warm autumn day when I wrote the first Platform Weekly. Back then, platform engineering was growing for sure, but no one would expect the meteoric rise that was soon to come.

I had a few thousand followers on Twitter then, so the first few PWs went out to a couple thousand people. Now? It’s over 100,000…

A lot has changed in the last 2 years. But Platform weekly most of all. Let’s take a look at our best platform weekly ever, our worst platform weekly ever, and our first platform weekly ever.

PW1: Beating Cognitive (Over)load

Back then PW was mostly focused on highlighting cool stuff from other people. Especially coming hot off PlatformCon 2022. Infrastructure platform engineering wasn’t a developer concept yet, and the fundamental concepts of golden paths and cognitive load were still pretty blurry.

PWZERO: Is AI platform engineering the future?

There are some times you write something. A social media post, article or… a newsletter and you think. “Yeah, this is gonna be a banger.”

Interesting content. Trendiest topic imaginable, and what do you get?

The worst performing platform weekly ever. 

In the end, I am not too surprised, the trendiest topics are also the most saturated topics. And when it comes to platform engineering. There is some interesting stuff to say - but it is far from the most exciting thing in our space right now.

I am a strong believer that the impact of a good platform engineering initiative on an organization will be massively larger than most of the trendy AI implementations atm.

Seems like the community agrees with me.

PWHERO: State of Platform Engineering 2024

Our best newsletter ever was just a few weeks ago. And the second best? A week before that. With the way that platform engineering (and this newsletter) has skyrocketed in the last year, it’s no surprise that almost every newsletter is our most-read one.

This newsletter was sharing the surveys for the upcoming State of Platform Engineering report. You can find the surveys here:

• State of Platform Engineering 2024 Survey
• 2024 Platform Engineer Salary Survey

These 3 newsletters (and the almost 100x difference in their readership) can tell us a lot about the way platform engineering has changed over the last 2 years. It’s gotten bigger. More developed. More standardized. More advanced. But…

Most people are still trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. And like all things in tech, that fear of missing out gets balanced out by the fear of jumping on to something that might not have the permeability you’d hoped.

With platform engineering though? It’s pretty clear to me it’s here to stay. Let’s just see how far it can go.

See you in Platform Weekly 200😉