BackstageCon Europe 2026: What I Am Looking Forward To

I looked at my calendar this morning and realized KubeCon and BackstageCon Europe is next week. Amsterdam, March 26. I have been looking forward to this for months, and somehow it arrived faster than expected. It usually does.

I already started packing. My conference bag contains: laptop, space for all the swag, snacks for the plane because airplane food is nasty, and a notebook I will use for exactly one hour before switching back to my phone.

Why Amsterdam at This Moment Feels Special

Backstage turned five years old in 2025. Five years since Spotify open-sourced it, and it has grown into something none of us fully predicted. According to a DX survey released last year, Backstage holds around 89% market share among organizations that have adopted an internal developer portal. And 67% overall market penetration across companies that were even considering a developer portal.

Those numbers are absurd when you think about where this project started. It was an internal tool at a music streaming company. Now it runs developer infrastructure at banks, airlines, telecoms, and tech companies across the world. The CNCF graduate project has more plugins than I can count and a community that keeps adding more every week.

At last year's BackstageCon in London, the energy was already high. This year I expect it to be even higher. There are several things I want to see and hear in person.

KubeCon London

The MCP Integration Conversation

One thing I have been reading about and experimenting with is the MCP integration for Backstage. The plugin that exposes Backstage actions as tools for AI clients is new and still evolving fast.

I want to hear from teams who are already using it in production. What actions are they exposing? What authentication challenges did they hit? Is the performance acceptable for AI tool calls? The official docs give me the what, but the conference hallway conversations give me the why and the watch-out-for-this.

If you are at the conference and working on MCP integration in Backstage, please find me. I want to talk.

The New Frontend System in Practice

The new frontend system has been adoption-ready for a while now, but I still hear from teams who are struggling with the migration. The concepts are clear, the docs are improving, but the actual pain points show up when you have fifty plugins to migrate and a team of ten developers.

I am curious to see conference talks that address this practically. Not just "here is the API" talks, but "here is what we ran into and how we solved it" talks. Those are the most valuable ones for me.

What Conferences Are Actually Good For

I want to be honest because I have written before about the post-conference sales calls. The content of conference talks is useful, but it is also largely available as recordings afterward. The real value of going in person is different.

It is talking to the person who gave a talk for ten minutes after their session and asking the question they did not have time to answer on stage. It is meeting the developer from a company you never heard of who solved the exact problem you are stuck on. It is eating lunch with someone and realizing you have been building the same thing independently, and you could be collaborating.

The stickers are also fine. My kids have covered most available surfaces with them.

What I Am Not Excited About

Vendor booths. The badge scanning. The follow-up calls that start three days after the conference. The very large company presentations where the main message is "our cloud service integrates with Backstage" and nothing more specific.

But these are part of the deal. You take the good with the slightly annoying.

See You There

If you are going to BackstageCon Europe in Amsterdam, I would be happy to meet in person. I will be at the Backstage-related sessions, definitely at the community gathering if there is one, and probably wandering around looking for good coffee. I will also be co-hosting the Backstage ContribFest this year, and you may even see me on stage during BackstageCon.

This is a good time to be part of this community. The project is mature enough that the fundamentals work. It is still young enough that the important architectural decisions are being made now and the community has real input in them. That combination does not last forever.

I am Heikki Hellgren, lead developer and technology enthusiast at OP Financial Group. You can connect with me on LinkedIn!