Platform Engineering Meetup: SREcon 2025
Join us on the eve of SREcon for a night of platform engineering talks and networking! We're honored to be joined by our speakers (who are in town for SREcon), Paige Cruz from Chronosphere, David Rifkin from Embrace, and Theo Klein from Google.
This will be the fourth SF Platform event, and the first we've hosted in Silicon Valley.
This is an excellent chance to meet the local Silicon Valley platform community, as well as those visiting for SREcon. If you're working in engineering, platform, infrastructure, DevOps, or are curious about the fields, you won't want to miss this one.
Talks
More Carrot, Less Stick: Driving Platform Adoption — Paige Cruz, Principal Developer Advocate at Chronosphere
You built a platform or some tool to make engineers' lives easier—but they aren't using it. Now what? "Build it and they will come" is a cute phrase but doesn't reflect reality. Chasing down teams or individual developers to enforce compliance is a recipe for frustration all around.
There's a better way! By borrowing practices from UX Research, Product Management and yes even Marketing you can understand what is and isn't working, gather meaningful feedback, and show your platforms value and impact.
Mobile Reliability: Where to Start? — David Rifkin, Developer Relations Engineer at Embrace
The speaker is tired of this phrase: “mobile teams operate in siloes”. Let’s disprove it, so he doesn’t have to say it again!
Mobile apps have software stacks, build and publishing processes, and user interactions that are completely different from the other software in your organization. This doesn’t mean they’re a black box. We’ll discuss how apps can operate as platforms, and how teams apply platform best practices like CI/CD and observability to improve in a familiar way.
Mapping a Better Future with STPA — Theo Klein, Senior SRE-SWE at Google
Want to prevent outages before they happen? Traditional SRE methods focus on component failures, but a whole class of outages stem from unexpected system interactions. We found a solution.
In our team, we use Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) to identify and fix system-level vulnerabilities before they cause outages. By applying STPA during the design phase, we've prevented major incidents and saved countless engineering hours.
This talk will show you how STPA can transform your approach to reliability. We'll share a real-world example where STPA caught critical design flaws that traditional methods missed, saving us months of costly rework.
Don't wait for outages to happen. Learn how STPA can help you build more resilient systems and become a 1000x engineer.
Venue + event
We're meeting at Vertex Ventures in Palo Alto (entrance is around the back on 345 Jacaranda Lane). Talks will start around 6:30 and end around 7:30. We'll be offering drinks (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) as well as light refreshments. Last9 + Shipyard