IDPCon 2024 Recap

IDPCon 2024 saw 300+ live attendees descend on the heart of Times Square in New York City for a 1-day-only event, hosted by Cortex. While we heard plenty of chat on Developer Portals, we also heard several talks, roundtables, and hallway conversations dive into the nuances of platform engineering, developer productivity, AI, and practical how-to advice on building vs buying.

Folks from companies like The New York Times, Blackstone, and LinkedIn shared best practice, asked questions, and left with many more LinkedIn connections than they had a few hours earlier. And while it would be difficult to capture every highlight from two dozen+ roundtables, sessions, and panels, we did notice a few key trends, highlighting the industry’s focus on measuring productivity beyond efficiency, building versus buying IDPs, and expanding automation into every layer of development.

Trend 1: Rethinking Developer Productivity Metrics

1. Keynote: The Past, Present, and Future of Developer Productivity Theories and Metrics
   • Speakers: Ganesh Datta (Cortex) and Margaret-Anne Storey (University of Victoria)
   • Description: Storey and Datta introduced how modern frameworks like SPACE are reshaping productivity tracking in developer experience. Storey discussed research-backed perspectives on how DevEx metrics can be made more meaningful, while Datta offered practical insights on reversing focus from input metrics to output metrics, and how treating your portal like a product is instrumental in bringing these insights to life.
2. Panel: A Founder’s Perspective on Developer Experience: Trends and Data
   • Speakers: Abi Noda (DX), Anish Dhar (Cortex), Kaspar Von Grunberg (Humanitec)
   • Description: This panel brought together founders of DevEx-focused companies to discuss their distinct approaches to developer experience. Noda, Dhar, and Grunberg shared insights on the specific data they prioritize, the challenges they’ve encountered, and what’s next for DevEx-focused platforms.
3. Roundtable: DORA vs SPACE vs DevEx: Unpacking Metrics Frameworks
   • Moderator: Abi Noda (DX)
   • Description: Noda facilitated an interactive discussion on the SPACE, DORA, and DevEx frameworks, exploring ways to apply these tools in real-world scenarios. The roundtable emphasized adapting these frameworks to support and measure developer productivity in a way that reflects everyday work challenges.

Trend 2: The Future of IDPs—From Practical Scalability to Portal as a Product

1. Session: When to Stop Building Your Own IDP
   • Speaker: Mark Dunlop (Xero)
   • Description: Dunlop charted Xero’s journey from custom-building an IDP to adopting Cortex. He addressed the unique demands of maintaining an in-house platform versus the scalability and resource benefits of ready-made solutions, sparking questions about the trade-offs of control versus efficiency.
2. Roundtable: Scaling the Portal to Support Growing Teams and Projects
   • Moderator: Pragya Jaiswal (Paxos)
   • Description: This roundtable examined the tradeoffs between customizability and scalability, and how to properly source and evolve your list of requirements when standing up your own Internal Developer Portal program.
3. Roundtable: What Does It Take to Build Your Own IDP?
   • Moderator: Luke Shannon (Intact)
   • Description: Shannon drew on his extensive experience building IDPs to lead a conversation on the pitfalls and best practices of custom-built platforms. Attendees discussed how to balance customization with scalability, as well as common challenges encountered when deploying internal platforms.

Trend 3: Automating the Inner Loop and Scaling with Efficiency

1. Session: Blueprints of Innovation: Engineering Paved Paths for a User-Friendly Developer Platform
   • Speaker: David Grizzanti (The New York Times)
   • Description: Grizzanti shared The New York Times’ approach to creating a self-service, user-friendly IDP that provides “paved paths” to accelerate development. He focused on standardizing CI/CD pipelines, simplifying onboarding, and fostering a cloud-agnostic platform to reduce setup times and enable faster time-to-market.
2. Roundtable: The Next Wave of Platforms: Automating the Inner Loop of Development
   • Moderator: Louis Bichard (GitPod)
   • Description: Bichard led a discussion on the “inner loop” of software development—the everyday cycles of coding, testing, and debugging. Participants explored how automation and tooling in these loops could significantly boost developer satisfaction and productivity, paving the way for a more efficient platform engineering model.
3. Roundtable: Platform Engineering is Product Management
   • Moderator: Luca Galante (Humanitec)
   • Description: Galante emphasized that platform engineering should adopt a product management mindset, advocating for regular feedback loops and prioritization of developer needs. The conversation revolved around integrating user feedback into platform development, managing feature requests, and finding the right balance between flexibility and structure.

If we learned one thing from IDPCon 2024, it was that while there's clear momentum around this topic, everyone is still "figuring it out." And if we're going to get serious about achieving our individual definitions of Engineering Excellence, we need more open spaces like this one, to learn from, challenge, and build alongside one another. To stay in the loop on upcoming events and opportunities to meet your fellow builders, follow Cortex on LinkedIn!