Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly crack of the platform engineering walnut. Every week we unpack another part of the platform engineering world, diving into news, best practices, lessons and insights from the community.

We’re just 6 days away from starting the first Platform Engineering certification class of 2025. The demand has been amazing!

For being such an awesome community, I want to share a last-chance discount code to save an additional $300 for the last few spots (we’ve also kept the early bird discount going for a total savings of over $700!). 

Interested in joining? Use code:

300OFF-LASTCHANCE

understanding isn't enough

I get a lot of opportunity to talk to platform engineers. In the last 6 months, there have been hundreds of conversations in the course, in calls, in-person, at roundtables or even just via message on Slack and LinkedIn. There is one thing that unites 90% of those conversations. Whether it’s a CIO owning a new enterprise-wide platform initiative, or it’s a new aspiring engineer at their first PE role, they all face the same challenge.

They don’t have the foundations of how to understand and deliver platform engineering effectively OR the even harder challenge - they get it, but their team, their boss, their boss’s boss just don’t. There is a reason why so many of the people who take our platform engineering fundamentals course are recommendations. The course focuses heavily on that idea. How can you make sure you, and everyone around you are aligned?

It’s not enough to understand platform engineering, if everyone around you doesn’t get it. Platform engineering is a multiplayer game. That’s crucial not just for the many cross cutting concerns it’ll touch, but also within your own team. You might be best platform product owner around - but if your developers think platform engineering is just Heroku-style PAAS or worse a UI on your current CI/CD setup, you’re never going to get them on board and get the results you want.

We’ve been talking a lot recently about how platform engineering needs to avoid the DevOps problem - where if you asked 10 people what DevOps is, you get 11 answers.

Definitions are just as crucial as best practices. If you don’t have the same definition of platform engineering as your boss, or your boss’s boss. You’re going to be in trouble.

There is a reason we spend so much time on it.

P.S. Want to make sure your boss is on the same page as you? Book a seat in the course and email me and we’ll give your boss 100% off. We can hammer them together!

Don’t forget to use code 300OFF-LASTCHANCE for $300 off the early bird price.