Mark Pawlikowski: SREday, LLMday and PLATFORMday

Why this conversation

Most of the conversations of the day were with the people on the stands and the stage. This one is with the person behind the room. Mark Pawlikowski is co-founder of SREday, and the organiser behind several other conferences besides. The host recorded the conversation on 2 November 2026 at SREday Amsterdam: “We are here in Amsterdam at the amazing ING space”.

From chaos engineering to three days

“So we started back in 2020 with some conferences around chaos engineering”. They moved online, with Conf42, “and now since 2022 we’ve been running SREday.” This year brought two more names: “we also launched this year LLMday on large language models and PLATFORMday on developer experience platform engineering developer platform.”

They travel a lot: “We’re traveling quite a lot.” Mark is based in London. How many people do they reach? “Hundreds, maybe thousands, depends on the location.” But each room is kept small on purpose: “Our events are pretty intimate.” “We do around 100 attendees.” The reason is the conversation in the hallway as much as the talk on stage: “We want to have this community vibe where it doesn’t feel overly big so that people can actually have conversations and sit together”. Counted across the years, it adds up: “Over the years, thousands for sure.”

Film festivals, and a brother who is an SRE

The pair behind it is not the usual pair of engineers. “I have a background in film festivals.” Mark’s co-founder is a brother, Miko Pawlikowski, and “he is an SRE full-time.” So they built something at the crossing of their skills: “So me with events and him with the knowledge and the technical side.”

The host asked how agentic AI is changing their world, and Mark saw two sides. The first is Mark’s own work. “I haven’t been a coder before”, Mark said, and now: “So I find myself vibe coding a lot for tools for my team to make it easier, more frictionless to organize.”

Why AI got its own day

The second side is the programme. “The reason why we started LLMday was because SREday was dominated by AI talks.” So they drew a line, a division “where there are still some good topics like on SRE without AI that can be had here.” Many talks at SREday will still be about AI, Mark admitted, but there is room to talk about something else. And on the other side of the line: “And LLMday, which is like full-blown, large-language models, kind of go crazy.”

For anyone who runs a community, the choice is worth noting. Rather than let one topic take over the agenda, they gave it its own day, and kept the original one for the reliability work that was its reason to exist.

Getting involved

Each event has its own pages, “We have like WhatsApp group and stuff.” But Mark pointed to one set of addresses: “But I think the best place to start is sreday.com, llmday.com, platformday.com and conf42.com.” Four addresses, one for each event: SREday for reliability, LLMday for large language models, PLATFORMday for platform engineering, and Conf42 online.

When it comes out

The episode is edited and in the release order. Like every episode it goes out on YouTube first, then on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.