Four days, eighteen missed sessions, and a private roundtable with Kelsey Hightower: SCALE 23x as it actually happened

me@ssoriche.com (Shawn Sorichetti) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The schedule I built two weeks ago was a fiction. A useful fiction — it forced real thinking about tradeoffs — but eighteen of the sessions I marked as “MUST” or “HIGH” are now links in a YouTube folder I won’t open before 2027. The one session that wasn’t on any schedule, wasn’t announced publicly, and had no recording? That one I can still reconstruct line by line.

That’s the gap between the conference you plan and the conference you actually attend.

Four days, 277 sessions, one brutal Sunday time slot: scheduling SCALE 23x as a platform team manager

me@ssoriche.com (Shawn Sorichetti) — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are 277 sessions at SCALE 23x this year. I know this because I extracted all of them from the schedule webarchive files and scored every single one.

I’m not proud of how long this took. But it surfaced some genuinely interesting tradeoffs — and the pattern of what conflicted with what tells you something real about where platform engineering is right now.

The scheduling problem is different when you manage a team
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When I was an IC, conference scheduling was mostly about depth. Find the three talks that will blow your mind and plan the rest around them. Everything else is hallway track.

SCALE on Shawn Sorichetti

Four days, eighteen missed sessions, and a private roundtable with Kelsey Hightower: SCALE 23x as it actually happened

Four days, 277 sessions, one brutal Sunday time slot: scheduling SCALE 23x as a platform team manager

The scheduling problem is different when you manage a team #

The scheduling problem is different when you manage a team
#