Exploring Platform Engineering and AI Insights with Thoughtworks’ Rickey Zachary

Hey everyone. I hope you've enjoyed our coverage over here today at our Platform Con in person, uh, live coverage. Everything we've done will be available on demand, probably in a day or two.

'cause even though we stream it live here, we do edit up, uh, the, the individual pieces when we, we put 'em up. And as usual, they'll be available on tech drunk tv, tech, drunk tv, YouTube channel, tech drunk tv, ott, uh, app, which is, uh, iOS, Android, apple tv, Roku, and Amazon Fire. So do check that out.

Let me introduce you to what I think is gonna be our last guest of the day. His name is Ricky Zachary. Ricky.

Sometimes people call him Flash around here 'cause he went from London to New York. Appeared in both conferences. I think one of only two or three people who were at both.

Yes. Have you done anything on the virtual side the rest of the week, or is that enough? That Was enough for me.

I Hear you. This platform con, it was enough for me. Um, so Ricky, welcome to Tech Shark tv.

It's great to have you on here. Nice, nice to be here. Really appreciate it.

So besides, uh, besides Globe trotting, tell us a little bit about your life journey. Yeah. So, um, I, I graduated from, um, a school in Georgia.

Oh, I graduated from school in Georgia. I'm from Atlanta. Grew up there and immediately started doing technology and engineering.

So I worked at, um, NCR, doing point of sales terminal. Sure. Uh, development.

So working at CC plus plus, those types of things. And then I only did that for a little bit because I had to go to Beaver Creek, Ohio, and as a Southerner, uh, I couldn't survive that first winter. No, that's a tough place for Winham.

I got, they make good quarterbacks there though. Great quarterbacks. Yes, yes.

Yeah. Yes, of course. Um, I did that for, um, the, the six months.

Uh, and then I actually went over to Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor, and I worked there for, uh, a little bit over 15 years, working in a bunch of different locations on a ton of different projects. Worked on COBOL programming, kicked COBOL at the Social Security Administration. Um, and then near the end of my career there, really got focused on platform engineering, DevOps on kind of automation, leading those types of teams, and then providing the best value to developers and developer experience, uh, from a developer experience standpoint.

Then took a little bit of a break, and then now I'm at ThoughtWorks and I've been there for about four years doing a lot, lot of different things, um, doing, uh, working with startups, um, working with large VC and PE firms. And now in my current role, I'm the global lead of platform engineering for ThoughtWorks. And so I get to travel around globally talking to extremely large enterprises, mid-size companies, small companies about platform engineering, how can we advance the craft?

How can we help developers get the most value out of their platforms? And then just how can we do platform engineering better? What a great gig that is.

It's, it's the best I get to talk about what I love, what I'm passionate about with some of the biggest companies in the world. That's great, Ricky. Good for you.

Good for you. It's a lot of fun. Um, so how, how long you been doing that at ThoughtWorks?

So I've been doing this, uh, this particular role I've only been doing since November. Okay. Of last year.

So formally since November of last year. Um, and it's been a whirlwind. Um, so Far.

Imagine, So Far. Imagine, You know, because one, one of the themes we've kind of hit on today speak to a lot of people out here and, you know, the term platform engineering may be new to them. Oh yeah.

It's been around a couple years, but I've interviewed people who have been managing platforms for 20, 25 years here today. Right. Yeah.

The lady a a few people and, you know, so you know what they say in, in technology, right? It's more evolutionary than revolutionary. And, you know, a a lot of what we see today as best practices have evolved over the last 10, 20 more years.

And, and, and, you know, and then, but then you mix in fresh technology like AI and, and these kinds of things. So stuff is always fresh and changing. Mm-hmm.

But it is based on like solid principles. Anyway. I know you spoke in London.

Yes. Yes, I did. Did and and here.

Yes. Yes. So tell us what you spoke about.

So in, so some of those foundational elements actually, so the, um, I was on a both a panel with, uh, Nikki Watts and Cornelia Davis, uh, from Cornelia. Yeah. Cornelia Davis.

She's A good friend of mine. Yes, yes. I didn't realize.

Yeah. Is she here? Or Oh, no, she was in London.

In London, Yes. So, um, the panel that we had was actually about what does great platform engineering look like? So we talked a lot about those foundational principles, the foundational elements, particularly beyond just the tech, right?

The processes, product, platform thinking. Um, how do you organize your team so that your, uh, platform team is successful? A lot of those foundational elements are, are the things that we talked about, those foundational principles.

And then I follow that up by doing one of the keynote talks there where I really dove into the changes that we've seen from 2018 when platform engineering really hit like the seminal moment and, and the kind of technology zeitgeist to now. And what are some of those evol, uh, the, some of the things that have evolved, right? Uh, some of the things that have changed really around the technology stack, which is extremely volatile, right?

Kelsey and his, uh, keynote show that CNCF diagram where there's like 400, 500 different technologies there, which makes it really difficult to manage. But then also the other things around measurement. How do you measure the impact of the platform engineering teams, um, you know, the things that they're doing and how do you organize the team in a successful way?

Um, how do you interact with the developers, right? Because you were mentioning, you know, the evolution of platform engineering at the heart it was, Hey, we wanna do more for the developers. It started with automation.

Okay, we'll automate some of these things. We'll, we'll script things out. And then that moved over to DevOps.

And now to do DevOps at scale in a consistent way to really help developers in organizations of a thousand or 2000 or 20,000, you, you have to start thinking about platforms and platform engineering as an actual practice and a set of capabilities. Yeah. And that's where it's not just automation, it's not, that's something I want to reemphasize.

Yep. A lot of people say, oh yeah, we're gonna sprinkle a little AI on it, it's gonna automate stuff. And what a great, we made life easy on developers.

Yeah. There's a couple of things. Number one, you know, developers have achieved this apex predator in our food chain kind of space.

And everything we do, we do for them. Well, yes and no. Everything we do is to make our organizations better, more profitable.

Yes. More efficient, more secure. Yes.

Agreed. Right? And, you know, yes, developers are important, but they're not, not the only thing, number one, number two really isn't about automating, adding six I i had I say I was on a, you know, we do this text on gang show every Monday to Friday.

I'm gonna invite you on one day. You'd love to do this. It's a bunch of pundits just talking.

One of the lessons I learned in my life, in, in, in technology is just because you can doesn't mean you should. Exactly. Yes.

I, And so there are some things that we really don't need AI on or that we don't, we should not automate. Mm-hmm. Right.

There are things we should Yes. And knowing when, when to do or not to do is, is really a, a key piece of that. That's interesting that you said that because yesterday, um, prior to the panel that we did, uh, yesterday, it was the question was, okay, how much are we gonna talk about ai?

And we instinctively said kind of eye roll, uh, can we not talk about it that much? Mainly because we wanted to focus on those fundamental e right. Uh, elements.

Because if you get those right and you do AI afterwards, you're gonna get tremendous more impact on that than if you just are throwing AI at a random problem. Just AI for AI's sake, I think we were calling it, uh, strategy by fomo. Right?

Right. Yeah. Everyone's so afraid of missing out on the AI Hunt and it sucks the air out of every conversation Exactly.

As a Result. Exactly. I get it.

I i believe me, I get it. ai figure. We'd move all the AI there so that we could talk about security and DevOps and platform engineering and all the stuff we cover on our other sites, and we sometimes be religious oblivious.

Yeah. And, um, you know, we can't do that. But anyway, it's still seeping to everything we do.

Yep. So now let's get this, so you, you did your keynote, you did Your panel, I did keynote today, I did a panel. You ran over the Heathrow.

Yep. Ran over the Heathrow, took the, took the Elizabeth line over to Heathrow Uhhuh, took a late night flight, got here in New York at about midnight, uh, last night, this morning, got a quick nap and then showed up today. And, uh, coincidentally led the panel on how AI is changing platform theory.

Oh God. Well, some things just go like that, right, man. Right.

It seeps into everything. So, um, but, but led that panel with, uh, three incredible, incredible, uh, panelists that were there. Um, Akasha from Google, um, um, uh, the CTO of, um, of, uh, Rutley, who, I'm forgetting his name.

Uh, uh, Sylvan. Yeah. Yeah.

That s Sivan. He's free, He lives in Fort Lauderdale nearby. Oh Yeah, he does.

He does. He does. We mentioned that.

We talked about that. And then Aaron, uh, Copeland from Nvidia. Sure.

And that, three of them did a wonderful job, uh, really shepherding me through what are some of the things that we should be thinking about as AI continues to seep into platform engineering, kinda really across three or four different dimensions. And so yeah, that, that was a very, um, eye-opening panel for me. As someone that's talking about platform engineering all the time and talking about AI all the time with, um, a lot of my clients through ThoughtWorks.

It was a ton of extremely informative information that they were giving, and I learned a lot that I'm gonna start taking back and talking to my clients about as well. I love it. Hey Ricky, that camera's on you.

Oh, yes. People who are watching this live right now, they're not here. Why should they come to next year's platform engineering show?

Oh, I, I would say if you're a platform engineer and you weren't here this year and you need to come next year because of two reasons in particular. One, this is really the only conference, um, that I've seen and attended where actual platform engineers are talking to platform engineers, any of the other conferences that are out there, it's a lot of data. People talking to platform engineers and, um, a lot of cloud people talking to platform engineers and why that's important.

This is the only area where we've got actual platform engineers talking to real platform engineers. And the second, uh, one is, is that it's the greatest platform engineering conference that's out there right now. So Absolutely, Really big reasons why they should be attending next year.

For people who wanna follow you and what you're doing around platform engineering, what's the best thing to tell 'em to do? They should, uh, follow me on LinkedIn. Um, just look up my name, Ricky Zachary, and they'll find me.

I'm doing a ton of stuff on there. Um, putting out even more content about platform engineering and subsequently, because it seeps into everything AI and how we can kind of accelerate and mature the platform engineering practice with, with AI and platform. I Love it, man.

Hey, thank you for all you're doing it for the community. Thank you so much for having me on the Textron. You deserve a well deserved rest, my friend.

Too hard. I'm gonna be trying to get time on Saturday. All right, we'll see you then.

Yes. Um, I think that may wrap up our live coverage here platform. Kind of course, the conversations will continue.

com. We do a great platform engineering show podcast with my friend Luca and I and occasional webinars, um, or on Techstrong TV where we're talking about this stuff all the time. Ricky, thank you.

Thank you for joining us. We're out. Take care everyone.