Software and Other Shenanigans

Reading a lot about platform engineering kept reminding me about the concept of the paved road (I’ve also seen the term “golden path”) in software engineering. It’s easy to understand why – if you do platform engineering correctly, then you end up with a paved road. Spotify probably has the best definition of a golden path (emphasis mine): “The Golden Path — as we define it today — is the ‘opinionated and supported’ path to ‘build something’ (for example, build a backend service, put up a website, create a data pipeline).” For all practical intents and purposes, a paved road is essentially the output of platform engineering. But why should we be trying to pave these roads? Shouldn’t we just build a stack and incorporate toolsets specific to each project, app, or service? Surely that way we can optimize for the specific problems each was built to solve, right? Wrong.

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