"First temptation? Tools. "Let's use Backstage for service scaffolding!""Let's go with ArgoCD!""Wait, what about Crossplane?" It took one tense meeting to realize we were grabbing knives before deciding what to cook. So we paused and asked: What journeys should a dev complete without opening a Slack thread? What needs to be self-served? What's our "platform MVP"? We weren't building a cathedral. We were starting with one dish: deploying a backend service safely."
"We didn't start with tools. We started with chaos. In Part 1, we learned why platform engineering matters. In Part 2, we explored what a platform engineering team does. Now comes the messy, beautiful truth: how it's actually done. This is the story of building our first golden path - not a grand vision, but one real, working journey. Press enter or click to view image in full size"
The team moved from chaos to deliberately building a single golden path focused on deploying a new backend service safely. The first step prioritized principles over specific tools, asking which developer journeys must be self-served and defining a platform MVP. The chosen principles were GitOps for consistency, Infrastructure as Code for transparency, and guardrails rather than gates. The implementation mapped the full flow: GitHub pushes trigger CI builds, ArgoCD syncs Helm charts to Kubernetes, and monitoring and observability are provided with Sentry, Prometheus, and Grafana. The approach emphasizes starting small and delivering a complete, repeatable developer experience.
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