Palantir DevCon 1 Recap

Viva la Devolution

Dorian Smiley
3 min readNov 15, 2024

You say you want a revolution

Palantir just hosted its inaugural DevCon, and it was a banger. Over 150 developers from Palantir customers and partners spent two days hacking on Foundry. More value was created in that 48 hours than will be created this year at some of our largest institutions. The most valuable technology resource on the planet is Foundry developers. Companies that consolidate that talent within their four walls will obliterate their competition. If your teams are not learning Foundry, you are behind.

This event is deeply personal for me. I spent the last three years advocating for Palantir. I was the first person who was not a Palantir employee or customer to get access to Foundry. I quit my job in 2022 to dedicate the remainder of my career to Palantir because the writing was on the wall. Foundry is what's next in software. My biggest critique has always been that the platform was closed to the public. Developers are like test pilots. They will bend and break and push your platform to the limits. That feedback is critical for product teams. Until now, PD teams at Palantir have interfaced with FDEs to close this loop. We are all FDEs now.

Opportunity—it's what's for breakfast.

Value and wealth creation not seen since the launch of iOS has been unleashed into the developer ecosystem. We have been given the opportunity to rebuild the defense and commercial industrial base with software that works. If you are a skilled Foundry developer, consider becoming a founder. This is your time.

Palantir’s product teams operate at an obscene pace. This is the most productive software company on earth, period, full stop, end of story. While there were many product announcements at DevCon, the standouts for me are listed below.

Ontology as Code

The OSDK team demoed Ontology interfaces, which promise loose coupling between Foundry and our code bases. This will unlock interoperability, generating massive network effects for the community. Ontology interfaces allow you to model the shape and behaviors of your data fabric exactly as we do with code in languages like Java and TypeScript. This by itself is impressive. More impressive are the features announced at DevCon that will allow you to generate your Ontology from those interface definitions. I have been dreaming of Ontology as Code since 2022, and it's almost here.

VS Code, React, and Widgets

Full-stack React developers now have an alternative to Vercel, and it’s free. VS Code is now the default IDE in Foundry. You can work in platform or locally. GitOps is included. You can start React apps with the click of a button from your OSDK app and immediately leverage the power of AIP and Foundry as your backend. My DevCon team built a speech-to-text incident reporting system with transcription and regulatory search and compliance in less than 8 hours. React developers can empower citizen engineers downstream by incorporating their apps into Foundry and building custom Workshop widgets. The power of this platform for React developers can not be understated.

Workflow Builder

Workflow Builder is Kamran Khan’s latest project, which adds to his legacy as the architect of Pipeline Builder. If software is eating the world, graphs are eating software. Workflow Builder graphs your ontology and applications so developers can visualize their dependencies, troubleshoot access problems, and reason about the effects of changes. Workflow Builder is going to save countless hours by providing improved visibility and observability of Foundry apps.

Platform SDK

This was my pick for best product at DevCon. The Platform SDK allows you to orchestrate Foundry In TypeScript with tools like Terraform. This can 10x productivity so you can get the most out of the precious few Foundry developers. I will be spending a lot of my time working with the Platform SDK and Terraform to engineer outcomes for my organization.

To the victor go the spoils

Congratulations to the entire Palantir team on a massively successful event. The real winners, though, are the builders and investors (there is a lot of overlap in that Ven diagram) who will build intergenerational wealth and value on Palantir Technologies. Let’s get building!

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Dorian Smiley
Dorian Smiley

Written by Dorian Smiley

I’m an early to mid stage start up warrior with a passion for scaling great ideas. The great loves of my life are my wife, my daughter, and surfing!

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