We are here to “learn, have fun, and make a difference.” - Dr. W. Edwards Deming, productivity visionary

On October 24th in New York City, Cortex will host IDPCon, the first-ever in-person event dedicated to Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) and broader themes of developer experience and productivity. Aimed at engineering leaders, DevOps and SREs, and other practitioners responsible for developer experience, this gathering will unite top minds to tackle complex socio-technical challenges and share insights from industry leaders like Docker, Xero, LinkedIn, Clear, and Blackstone. Registration is open here: https://idpcon.com

Attendees will engage in sessions and discussions designed for knowledge transfer, brainstorming, and networking, with the goal of improving software delivery methods. Inspired by successes in the field, IDPCon aims to make transformative practices like platform engineering and IDPs accessible to all software engineering organizations. But first, a little background on how this event came to be...

What are we all doing here, anyways?

More than two thirds of the global GDP is now digitally transformed (IDC FutureScape, October 2021). This shared economic landscape is supported by a group of craftspeople known collectively as software engineers, who create and operate the apps that we use to connect to our friends, navigate our world, and, increasingly, to apply the skills we possess working remotely.

It would be rational to assume that the best tooling and most frictionless environments have been curated to support this ever-important workforce. It should be a no-brainer to prioritize the preservation of flow state, it should be paramount for any business hoping to profit from software productivity. We should measure leaders on those kinds of outcomes.

But, we don't.

Engineers still deal with painful bottlenecks and impediments to their productivity and creative flow. Inefficient processes and frenetic schedules lead to excessive context switching and cognitive fatigue, lowering overall innovative capacity. Worse, the industry has not settled on the right metrics and frameworks to properly measure and improve productivity, and even if it had, tool fragmentation and sprawl obfuscates much of the raw data and makes observation difficult.

Why IDPCon? Why now? Why us?

Internal Developer Portals are uniquely suited to solve some of these specific challenges. A well-implemented IDP will integrate with each sprawling endpoint of the platform, continuously monitoring those endpoints and orchestrating their behavior, and collecting the data that can be evaluated into useful metrics and presenting that data cross-functionally. But the IDP pattern is still relatively new, with the now widely recognized Backstage solution launching as an open source project just a little over four years ago. As an industry, we still have a lot to learn about what can be done with this pattern, and which use cases are still untapped.

That’s why we decided to host IDPCon. With this event, we are bringing together experts from organizations like Docker, Xero, LinkedIn, Clear, and Blackstone, to share what they’ve learned about this pattern, and what techniques really work for driving developer joy, continuous improvement, and increased productivity. The one-day program will consist of sessions and open spaces discussions, creating space for knowledge transfer, brainstorming, and networking. We hope that participants will come away with new clarity and understanding of how to apply these ways of thinking to improve their own methods of software delivery.

IDPCon is inspired by the same successes that have motivated the team at Cortex to keep investing and improving the product. We have witnessed the transformations that can occur when teams are no longer artificially burdened by practices that ignore the underlying systems and the root cause of productivity loss. The application of practices like platform engineering, and the implementation of tools like IDPs are patterns that can be shared and adopted by any software engineering organization, and we want these capabilities to be accessible to everyone.

The seemingly endless studies and decades of research all suggest one thing: investments in better developer culture leads to improved productivity outcomes. This in turn leads to better business throughput, and an accelerated pace of global innovation. We hope that you’ll take the day to learn with us, and be part of an event that will help to shape the future of developer experience.

Register here: https://idpcon.com