I Declared Platform Engineering Dead. At PlatformCon.

It started as a joke. A Friday brainstorming exercise, late in the day, the week before PlatformCon. Someone on our team said, “What’s something so unhinged they’d actually kick us out of PlatformCon?” The point wasn’t to actually get kicked out — just to push boundaries and see what might stick.

So I said: “Easy. I go dressed up as a poop emoji with a sign that says ‘scorecards are sh!t.’”

We all laughed.

Then Brandon, my colleague, threw out, “How about this: you show up at a platform engineering conference… and declare that platform engineering is dead.”

We laughed even harder. But then I paused.

“Wait. I do have funeral clothes at home. What if we make a funeral out of this?”

Brandon didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah. You show up saying in a serious tone, ‘I came here to pay my respects.’”

And just like that, the joke turned into a plan.

I had three days. My plane was leaving on Tuesday.

I used the weekend to design a two-sided funeral card: front side read like a eulogy, with a cartoon of an engineer crushed under labeled tech boxes (overwhelming the engineer due to its sheer diversity). The back explained the “cause of death”: golden paths, legacy migrations, broken scorecards, and standards documented that no one followed.

After brainstorming some more funny ideas with ChatGPT, another ridiculous idea emerged: giving away small vials of “ENGINEER TEARS”. Hilarious! I figured that they should be easy to make, and they’re small and lightweight — perfect for carrying around on my own. I ordered all the raw materials on Amazon on Saturday, filtering for next day delivery. I quickly designed the label.

The next day, I ran to the only print shop that was open on a Sunday, to print the cards and the vial labels.

FedEx guy: “So is Thursday ok for you?”. The guy at the FedEx office was overwhelmed by a full day of covering two jobs since his colleague had called in sick.

Me: “NO! My plane leaves the day after tomorrow!”

FedEx guy: “Oh.. also, we don’t have labels that small to print. You need special perforated sticky paper for that. We don’t have that in stock.”

Me, after some back-and-forth: “What if you just print on a big letter-size sticky paper, and then I just cut that out myself? Do you have that?”

FedEx guy: “No, I’m sorry. Oh… Wait… Hmm… That is not true”. He then goes in the back for what felt like an eternity and comes back with… the holy grail. One white sheet of letter-sized sticky paper.

Went back in Canva on my laptop, copied the design across in a 7x6 pattern on an entire piece of paper. And voilà!

FedEx guy, after now being emotionally invested: “Ok, I’ll put in the card printing for tomorrow evening. It’s very likely that it’ll run late though. Do you think you can pick them up on Tuesday morning if that happens?”

Me: “YES! THANK YOU!”

Me: “Now, do you also print on clothing?”

FedEx guy: “No, but I know this shop… oh wait they only open tomorrow.”

Looked up online for other options… quickest turnaround time was one week. Ugh…

I spent the rest of the day cutting the label sheet, and sticking them on all the vials with my wife’s help, and thinking about what to do about the sash.

All this prep was all for nothing if I didn’t immediately stand out.

In an act of desperation I bought a blank, white sash off Amazon, some thick marker pens, and some iron-on letters. The reviews for the letters were terrible. But I had no choice. Amazon came in last minute — the very evening before the flight.

I laid out everything on my kitchen counter.

The instructions were super dodgy. In one section it said “move the iron back-and-forth for 15-30s” and in another it said “hot tip! Do not move the iron in a back-and-forth motion”. 🤦

Also, 15-30 seconds, my a**. I spent the next two hours carefully ironing on the maximum possible setting that wouldn’t ruin the sash fabric, the letters still wouldn’t stick. I had read the instructions a million times at this point. The marketing clearly said that silk and nylon were compatible with the letters. But then again… was marketing ever to be trusted? Sigh…

I was ready to give up.

But then… as I was putting the iron away in disappointment, I had another idea: what if I iron the back side of the sash instead. I laid it all out again, turned up the iron again at dangerously high temp, and put my entire body weight on it. I could literally hear the letters squishing under the weight.

Finally…! The letters were now barely sticking! Good enough!

Caught the flight, and then later, in my hotel room, I sat there alone prepping for the big day, filling the vials with water ahem “engineer tears”. I wrote to my team on Slack:

I’m sitting here in my hotel room filling these up. It kinda makes you reconsider your life choices 😂

The next day, I walked into the conference fully suited, sash across my chest, black roses pinned and everything.

First reactions were immediate. People pointed. Laughed. Took photos. Some burst out laughing before even making it all the way through the sash. One person nearly dropped their coffee reading the funeral card.

I walked up to strangers and said, with a straight face: “I came here to pay my respects.”

People loved it. The reactions were rolling in:

“You can’t re-platform a hairball. That line alone deserves a standing ovation.”

“They built the golden path. Very few used it, but damn was it golden. HA! I love that!”

“Wait. You even bought platformengineeringisdead.com??? That is hilarious!”

“I read the whole thing and laughed my ass off. Who are you people??”

That last one came up more than once. Our branding, Earthly Lunar, was deliberately subtle. No hard pitch. No booth. Just dark comedy, well-executed. And it worked. One attendee told me:

“It’s actually kind of brilliant. Because now I have to go find out what you do.”

Another came up and said:

“Someone said ‘the funeral guy’ is walking around. I had to see for myself.”

Later, I changed out of the funeral outfit for another event, and still got approached:

“Wait, you’re the guy! The funeral guy! I saw you earlier today. Everyone’s talking about it.”

And then it happened. I bumped into Kelsey Hightower. And he asked me for a photo — not the other way around! My job here was done.

We left funeral cards on tables, at coffee stands, in breakout lounges. You’d see people reading them, chuckling, flipping them over and reading them again. They’d turn to someone next to them and say, “You have to read this.”

One person picked up a vial, read it, and said: “Honestly, this is too real. I have cried over a platform migration.”

Someone else said, “I’ve been on the receiving end of three golden paths.”

What struck me most was how quickly people got it. The funeral wasn’t just a joke. It resonated. The pain of legacy migrations. The futility of broken scorecards. The ghost town of abandoned Confluence docs.

And yet, it wasn’t bitter. It was catharsis. It made people laugh because the premise was true.

Someone told me: “I showed the card and the tears to Kaspar, [Humanitec’s CEO, the event organizer]. He was extremely amused!”. I later caught up with Kaspar telling him that I was initially afraid they would kick me out. He said “No, Vlad, you are welcome to all our events. We need more stunts like this”.

I had worried we were pushing too far. Turns out, we weren’t pushing far enough.

So yeah — platform engineering may or may not be dead. But if it is… we gave it one hell of a send-off.