About SCOTT

Head of Technology, Thoughtworks Australia

As the Head of Technology for Thoughtworks in Australia, Scott divides his time between professional services leadership and consulting. As a consultant, he helps enterprise customers shape their technology to align with 21st century practices like cloud, continuous delivery, microservices and lean governance.

As a lifelong programmer and technology professional, Scott has designed and worked on distributed systems of every imaginable size and shape. He sits on ThoughtWorks' Technology Advisory Board and is a long-time contributor to the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar.

When he’s not in meetings or giving presentations, Scott enjoys writing Clojure code.

Engineering Platforms Evolved

Melbourne

Cloud First

Multiple forces have converged recently to put internal technical platforms in the spotlight for digital businesses. This talk encapsulates key insights drawn from various teams who have delivered engineering platforms in diverse organisations and industries around the world.

I’ll cover some commonalities in what makes them successful and discuss some real examples. Crucial elements include empathising with the developer experience, enlisting executive support, establishing a sound operating model and most importantly, communicating the value of the platform. Value articulation is essential but veers dangerously close to the third rail of engineering metrics, developer productivity.

I'll also take a look forward at new standards, orchestration tools and of course, AI. We’ve found that large language models can improve developer experience in ways that go far beyond Copilot.

This talk is tailored for staff engineers, managers and technology executives who want to make continual, measurable improvements in their engineering organisation's effectiveness.