Celebrating your Software Platform Builders

Who are the people that have created the software development platforms you rely on every day?

(Image: The atmosphere I aim for with my keynotes … inspired by Classic FM at The Albert Hall, London)

I’m giving a keynote in New York and London the week after next. As well as talking about how internal developer platforms fail I also plan to use my own platform/stage to thank those people who have created the platforms that have made my software development life easier.

Because while the industry is littered with failed platforms, a handful of people have built the ones that changed everything for me. They built the ground I walk on. They gave me the tools that don’t just solve problems but open entire new worlds. That deserves a toast.

And I don't just want to feature mine, I want to know who those people are to you as well.

Celebrating the Platform Makers

Think about Rod Johnson and the Spring teams. They gave us Spring, and with it, a way to tame the beast of Java enterprise hell. Suddenly you didn’t need to drown in boilerplate, wait on slow testing feedback cycles, or kneel before J2EE. They made the JVM habitable.

Or Adrian Colyer and the AspectJ team (as well as the Spring team of course!), who helped shape AspectJ and brought Spring to life at scale. His work gave us power and elegance in the same breath, which is a rare combination in software.

Allard Buijze? He and the Axon team put CQRS and event sourcing into our hands, making event-driven systems feel less like an act of divine punishment and more like an engineering discipline. He helped me think “event first” when designing enterprise systems.

Go back further. James Gosling made Java. Like it or not, it was the language that made “write once, run anywhere” more than a sales pitch. It gave enterprises the confidence to move, and it gave millions of developers a common tongue.

Step further back. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie made Unix and C. Together they gave us not just an operating system, but a philosophy. Small pieces. Sharp tools. A model of portability that still beats in the heart of every container and cluster we run today.

Back to now and Dan Terhorst-North has given me CUPID. A set of properties that I can look to amplify in my platforms to make them a joy to use and curate. Charity Majors has given me clarity on observability more times than I can ever thank for. And the list really does go on.

If you zoom out even more, there’s Ada Lovelace. She looked at Babbage’s strange machine and saw more than arithmetic. She saw symbols, poetry, and art. She saw that computing could be a platform for the imagination way before Apple tried to shoehorn that into a phone and a tablet.

Why These People Matter

These people create platforms, and platforms are not just software. They are promises. A platform says: “Stand here, and you can reach higher.” The best platforms are invisible scaffolding, holding us up while we build things their creators could never have imagined.

The worst platforms? They fail because they forget this. They turn inward. They obsess over themselves. They trap developers instead of freeing them. They are the fancy hotels nobody checks into, the airstrips where no planes land. They end up as ghost towns.

These people create platforms that have consistently, again and again, lifted me up as a software developer.

A Toast, and a Question

My keynote will be both warning and celebration. A warning about the seductive traps that kill platforms—complexity, arrogance, and the belief that you can force adoption by decree. And a celebration of those who did it right.

Rod. Adrian. Jonas. Martin. Gosling. Thompson. Ritchie. Terhorst-North, Majors, Fielding. Poutsma. Nygard. Ada. Those are just some of mine.

I want to hear yours. Who built the platforms that shaped your world? Which names deserve a place in this pantheon? Whose work made you faster, freer, better at your craft?

Drop them in the comments. Let’s build a proper roll call of the giants whose shoulders we’re all standing on. A collective I can fold into my talk and thank from the stage.

Because the best platforms are not just about code. They’re about people.

Those people who are brave enough to give the rest of us new ground to stand on.

Let's thank them!