London Platform User Group (LOPUG), Wednesday 17th September, 6.30pm onwards

For our September meetup, we're back at the fabulous Accurx offices. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers, the agenda will be:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, networking
• 7:00pm - Talk 1: "Platform Engineering: Elevating the Human Layer of Tech"

Platform engineering success isn’t just about golden paths, self-service portals, or automation pipelines, it’s about how humans interact with them. The most elegant platform will fail if the teams it’s built for don’t adopt it.

In this session, we’ll explore how to design the “human layer” of your platform: the communication, trust, and collaboration patterns that drive adoption. Drawing on Team Topologies principles and the DevStefOps SCALE framework, you’ll learn how to match your interaction mode to the right communication style, reduce friction for consuming teams, and create a feedback culture that continuously improves your platform.

You’ll leave with practical tools to make your platform irresistible to use, and the humans behind it unstoppable.

Speaker: Stefania Chaplin, Founder & CEO @ DevStefOps
Stefania equips technical leaders and teams to communicate with the precision, confidence, and influence required at the highest levels. With a background in security and development, she has delivered multi-million-pound transformations that unite global, multicultural teams, elevating the human layer of tech to unlock collaboration and performance. She works with FTSE 100 companies and enterprise organisations all over the world, removing friction, accelerating decision-making, and building the trust essential for high-stakes collaboration. A sought-after global speaker, she has delivered hundreds of engagements that help organisations turn communication into a measurable competitive advantage.

• 7.30pm - food, more drinks & networking
• 7.45pm - Talk 2: "Beyond the Platform Façade: Why Portals and Pipelines Aren’t Enough"

Many platform engineering teams start strong with developer portals, workflow engines, and CI/CD pipelines. These tools bring quick wins, but they can also create a fragile illusion of progress. Without orchestration, governance, and lifecycle guarantees, platforms begin to duplicate effort, add operational burden, and ultimately decay.
Join Daniel Bryant for a whistle-stop tour of why Portals and Pipelines don't make a Complete Platform!

Speaker: Daniel Bryant, Head of Product Marketing @ Syntasso
Daniel's technical expertise focuses on ‘DevOps’ tooling, cloud/container platforms, and microservice implementations. Daniel is a long-time coder, platform engineer, and Java Champion, having contributed to numerous open source projects. He also writes for InfoQ, O’Reilly, and The New Stack and regularly presents at international conferences such as KubeCon, QCon, and JavaOne. In his copious free time, he enjoys running, reading, and traveling.

• 8.15pm onwards - drinks and networking.

So, please come and join us, we look forward to seeing you there.
The LOPUG team.

• Food and drinks provided
• Good time will be had by all