Software platforms: they are everywhere. Gone are the days of simply building a service for users; now everything is a platform. (What does that mean?) We use dozens if not hundreds of platforms every day in the process of building and shipping software.

This talk is about how you can be an intelligent, mindful, judicious user of platforms; how to read between the lines of what a vendor is willing to say about their platform; and how to be a good platform for others.

Charity is a cofounder and engineer at Honeycomb.io, a startup that blends the speed of time series with the raw power of rich events to give you interactive, iterative debugging of complex systems. She has worked at companies like Facebook, Parse, and Linden Lab, as a systems engineer and engineering manager, but always seems to end up responsible for the databases too. She loves free speech, free software and a nice peaty single malt.