Palantir's first DevCon & The Evolution of Software Engineering
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Last week I attended the first Palantir Developer conference as one of the DevCon fellowship winners. I gained passage by creating an application that integrated national weather data, code repositories, AIP and OSDK to simulate disaster scenarios across the U.S. based on active and historical weather patterns
DevCon
Foundry's inaugural DevCon brought together 15 competition winners and 140+ professionals representing a global footprint of Foundry installations.
Attendees ranged from Fortune 50 powerhouses to innovative startups like https://www.boundlessdiscovery.com It was a fascinating mix of industries and personal software development backgrounds.
I've probably attended around 100 tech events over my 12-year careerāspanning local meetups to leading industry conferences. Yet, Foundry's first DevCon stood out distinctly.
Badass cyberpunk terminal branding aside, Palantir's engineers truly operate on another level of software development. What they've builtāand abstracted into their Enterprise OSāis genuinely astounding. Every deep dive into the platform uncovers new solutions to problems I didn't realize I had.
The SaaS industry is playing checkers while Palantir devs are playing chessābuilding what I believe to be the most fundamental abstraction of HyperScalar infrastructure that will power the next generation of AI-driven applications and be the core of entire multi-national businesses.
The enterprise software sold today has literally been engineered for the battlefieldāand it shows. Like any software, Foundry has its quirks and nuances, but here's the difference: If you report a bug to a dev on X or their community dev forum, odds are high it will get fixed almost immediately.
Their culture of entrepreneurial meritocracy was evident in every interaction during the event. Their flat hierarchy is well-known, and their CTO lead ethos is quite literally:
"Ingest (customer) pain, excrete product." - @ssankar
As they scale to hundreds of thousands of developers in the coming years, I truly hope they can maintain the dedication to hardcore product engineering.
Product Launches
It feels like the 20-year promise of no-code software building has finally come to fruition. And the best part? You can still bring all your code, in any language (Code Repos, Compute Modules, and 'lambda' like fn()'s coming)
A little primer.
At the core of the Foundry platform is what they call Ontology. In the simplest terms, their Ontology applies schematization to every single iota of data that enters the Foundry OS. This schema lives alongside the data, enabling a meta programmed ability for native products and services to write business logic codeāall anchored on the language and possible actions of your source of truth data, across every facet of the platform.
It is truly a work of art.
Foundry has around 41+ native applications within it, and growing. You can think of these similarly to highly packaged AWS managed services or specific SaaS verticals.
I did a deep dive into the Foundry vs AWS comparison, breaking down the most similar AWS services that the Foundry native products are solving for.
Foundry/AWS services comparison
- ~24 of the 41 (and growing) core Foundry Products (aka Managed Services)
The Hackathon
2 days of build across ~6 sessions, teams of 4 from a random collection of developers familiar with different parts of the stack/value chain.
We were given a Foundry instance, and milestones to use different parts of the product - but an open ended prompt that we just needed to use notional/open-source datasets to build the most impressive application you could across the event.
Hackathons are notoriously hard, so luckily my team was down with the whale data idea and we collaborated quickly between sessions and got to interface with some of the most tenured Palantir engineers when we got hung up.
Some notable projects I loved:
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An end to end receipt capture & approval expensing app
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A 'medical' focused video stream that sent in images to AIP and deduced whether a patient was moving around to their kinesiology recommendation (kinda like xbox kinect lite)
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A delayed flight simulation application (@msl0727)
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An entire management dashboard for a mock city bike company
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Many others... Truly impressed by all the teams!
The Future of Platform Engineering
It's worth noting that Foundry has packaged all their 'Managed Services' in a way that requires essentially zero custom engineering. Pipeline Builder, for example, is one of Foundry's prolific no-code ETL tools, allowing even a business user with just a few days/weeks of training to develop state-of-the-art, Spark-based ingestion pipelines that can persist millions of records to a graph database (Ontology) within a WYSIWYG and a few button clicks.
This isn't just convenient; it's transformative.
If I could take away only one thing from the first Foundry DevCon it's that Foundry is enabling a whole new breed of full-stack software engineering and is actively flipping the equation for real IT & Product organization's operational budget. Instead of spending upwards of 90% of their effort on undifferentiated integration and glue workāleaving only 10% for work that drives business outcomesāFoundry reverses the ratio:
10% glue work, 90% value creation
I admit it sounds absurd that this metaphorical ratio can actually exist, and while teams are small it's still possible to navigate nimbly in a ~50/50 glue-to-value range, but as a team scales, complexity fragments & source of truth parity between systems becomes existential for a business, Foundry is going to be a game-changer for companies of any size.
Notice I've not even brought up Large Language Models. I will pocket that one for a later writeup focused exclusively on AIP and how Ontology is going to be required to actually turn LLM's into productive & trusted units of labor.
Just checkout any one of Karp's interviews on that topic in the meantime :)
Takeaway
DevCon also allowed me to meet real employees traditionally relegated to the BI, ERP, CRM or SaaS layer, who now get to play in the core nexus of the enterprise.
With only the native applications these users can now build internal dashboards, data monitors, write-back actions, or even ML models that leverage their domain expertise without relying on IT bottlenecks coordinating for IT resources..
Tapping into the millions of human workers who are not software engineers can't be understated!
This is not pure hype, either. Take this real-world example. I just saw Palantir's CTO @ssankar post about Liam Talbot, an award-winning naval engineer, who used Foundry to leap from coding his first function to training machine learning models within a year.
"I coded my first function this January, and [my mentor] told me I'd be training machine learning models by Christmas. I didn't quite believe her, but here we areā¦"
Foundry's ability to break down barriers to entry, democratizing access to advanced data engineering and machine learning tools is profound.
Foundry isn't just another enterprise toolset or SaaS vendorāit's going to enable a new era of scalable, user-driven innovation that transforms what's possible across industries.
If you're a software engineer building in a business setting, how often do you ask some variation of these purely glue work questions?
- "What datastore should we pick?"
- "How will this impact our micro services?"
- "How do we simulate outcomes with our event stream?"
- "Who is actually using this endpoint?"
- "Do you have the correct Infrastructure permissions?"
Do you notice anything about these questions? None of them contain anything related to the business outcome.
90% of the work is likely about Infra not alpha;
As an industry I feel the reckoning is coming. It's my opinion that as Foundry proliferates, leaders are going to be forced into very difficult questions from boards on the fact that 90% of their IT org spend is only delivering 10% of the value it could.
Foundry + LLM Coding for me, has reawakened what I consider possible in the realm of Software Engineering. I know it sounds absurd - but I genuinely have that excited feeling we are standing at the gates of a whole new era of software!
