Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly slice of platform engineering apple pie.

But first…

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5 takeaways from PlatformCon

Now that the dust has settled on PlatformCon 2025, and I’ve had the chance to watch all the live day talks and a large chunk of the workshops, let’s zoom in on my key takeaways from the world’s largest platform engineering event.

1. Great platform engineering “achieves outcomes”: In the opening panel at Live Day London, Cornelia Davis, Rickey Zachary, and Nicki Watt broke down their specifics of what great platform engineering is. The core idea, though? Your platform is great if it achieves outcomes.
2. Basically, no one's platform is “great”: Even by that simple definition, when moderator Sam asked a room of 700 people to raise their hands if their platform “achieved outcomes,” only NINE people raised their hands. Oof. We still have a lot of work to do.
3. Shift down, not left: I’ve been critiquing shift left for years now, but the script is finally flipping. Instead of just pushing responsibilities earlier, embed them deeper. Build the non-negotiable attributes like security, reliability, and scalability into the platform itself. That’s how you free up devs and actually scale sustainably.
4. AI is everywhere, but we’re missing the foundations: Almost 30% of all PlatformCon content across Live days, workshops, and talks featured AI. BUT all our top PE leaders shared the same thoughts - If you don’t have the foundations of PE down first (Platform as a product etc), then trying to throw a bunch of AI features into your platform isn’t going to help you.
5. Learning is everything: Unsurprisingly, considering the previous takeaways. Our in-person trainings were full to overflowing, and our workshop program had over 9,500 people in it. Learning is the most important topic in platform engineering right now.

There are over 255 talks, 30 virtual workshops, and 20+ live day talks of content either on our Youtube channel or being shared there soon over the next few weeks.

PlatformCon has always been the crystal ball for the industry, and this year that might be more true than ever before. With the industry maturing beyond the definition stage, and AI reshaping the world, what we learned last week is crucial for setting the course of the next year.

Damn, I’m excited.