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Internal Developer Platform Marketing, part 01

Most platform teams forget they have a product to sell to developers. Part one of my new series over at The New Stack lays out why internal platform marketing is incredibly important. Here’s excerpt on positioning:

Platform Positioning: What Is It Good For?

Positioning defines where your platform fits in your organization’s technical landscape. It answers the crucial question: “When and why should developers choose this platform over other options?”

Oftentimes, platforms are positioned as the everything solution that solves all the problems and, thus, should be used for all applications. This might be technically right, but narrowing down to a set of smaller, specific positions is helpful at first.

Here are some examples of how to position your platform:

  • Your platform is good for cloud native applications, not just any type of application.

  • Your platform is a good destination for modernized applications. Many modernized applications target cloud native architectures, moving apps to containers and microservices architectures.

  • Your platform is the best place to run Java applications, especially ones that use the Spring Framework.

  • Your platform is a great place to develop and run AI-enabled applications.

  • You could say that your platform is good for classic three-tiered web applications: something with a UI, a middleware and business logic layer, and then a database.

Another position could be that your platform is good for highly regulated apps that need to run in air-gapped environments.

You don’t need to pick just one positioning for your platform. After all, platforms are usually general and intended to be used for many different types of applications. However, coming up with multiple positions like the above allows you to speak to specific teams, making it easier for them to sort through all the options and figure out whether your platform is the right fit for them.

Do read the whole thing, and keep your eyes open for the next two (or three?) parts published sometime soon (maybe this week?).

Relative to your interests

Wastebook

  • “‘Memes' are low impact / high transmissibility. Think cat videos or brief flash-in-the-pan cultural moments that get forgotten quickly. ” Hi-memes, low-memes.

  • “Self-help-y semoitics.” Another good one.

  • “University lore claims the Geneva Bonnet was made from a pair of 16th-century trousers that belonged to Protestant Reformation leader John Knox.” Sure, why not?

  • “people who don’t always ‘do their best’ or ‘fulfill their potential’ are allowed to enjoy life, too?” Productivity for the rest of us.

  • Related: “you almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.”

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London.

I was accepted to speak at AI for the Rest of Us. I missed the first one, so I’m excited to get the chance to not only attend, but speak at this one. The English put on interesting, quirky conferences like this from time to time - it feels unique to them, but I’ve never spent the time to back that notion up. Anyhow, check out the talks, and you should come to it.

Also:

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

Logoff

My son does not like watching his videos around me. If we walk in the room, he’ll pause them, look-up, and smile at us. That’s a smile that say, “please, oh please, leave me alone so I can watch my YouTube.” This is a good moment to be a dad and say, “oh, it must be really good if you don’t want me to watch it! What is it!” and then sit down with him.

I soon leave. I’m not that dad-terrible.

Still, I walked in on this guy the other day. It was refreshing - not the usual Minecraft/Roblox yellers: boys playing video games, yelping and yelling about everything little thing.

But who is this? It’s not, as Google tried to guess, Mickey Rourke, William H. Macy, or even The Mouth of the South, Jimmy Hart.

I tried to get a discussion going about that shaved part of his mustache. No dice.

Whoever it is, this feels like a potential upgrade to (“expansion of”?) his YouTube taste.

@cote@hachyderm.io, @cote@cote.io, @cote, https://proven.lol/a60da7, @cote@social.lol