Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly gathering of the fellowship of the platform. This week we’re taking the platforms to Isen- okay, this intro is stretching it. Every week Platform Weekly dives into another area of the platform engineering world sharing news, highlights from the community, best practices, learnings, and more.

Platform Engineering in 2026

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With a 3-year track record now, I am more confident than ever that one of the most important things about PlatformCon is how much of a crystal ball it is for platform engineering as a whole.

With our PlatformCon Live days in London and New York this year, we’re putting that into overdrive.

If you were watching PlatformCon 2023 virtually last year, you might’ve seen your first mention of platform engineering reference architectures and platform as code. The topic had been discussed here and there throughout the community, but PlatformCon 2023 is where most of us really started thinking about it.

By PlatformCon 2024? More than 25% of talks featured reference architectures in that same model. A keen PC23 watcher could’ve called that trend perfectly (a talk on that topic was the second most-watched talk of the year). The same idea goes for portals in 2022. 

The massive explosion in Dev Portals caught me by surprise in 2023, but when I look at PC22? It was right there in front of my eyes. (and PC24 can let you see what happened next with that😉)

There is a power to getting us all together and sharing insights, ideas, and best practices. Talking about our wins and our disasters. It’s where we’re able to get a sense of what's working, and what isn’t.

Imagine how powerful it’d be if we were in the same room.

At PlatformCon NYC in 2025, you could talk to a platform engineer from a major bank about why their MVP worked (or didn’t work). You could speak to a newly minted DevEx platform engineer on how they stepped away from Backstage and cracked their adoption death spiral.

There is a reason we’re going all in this year on workshops and trainings. It’s all about getting the most out of this incredible resource of having us all together.

No one can say yet what future trends PlatformCon 2025 is going to tell us about, but I know that I’ll be paying close attention to find out.