fl@latini.dev:~/posts$ ls -t --human --sort=time
posts=27 total_read=~268 min range=2022-2026
# The Platform Team's Second Year
Year one of a platform team is a build. Year two is a run, and almost nobody re-plans for it. The maintenance ratio nobody budgets, why success is what generates the load, how to put the run cost in the plan in public, and the year-two failure mode nobody names: inventing a project to prove the team is still needed.
# How to Retire a Golden Path
Every paved road eventually has to be closed, and almost nobody plans for it. Deprecating a golden path is a product launch in reverse: it needs a destination that already works, a migration you wrote yourself, a funded owner for the last twenty percent, and a real turn-off date. The half-finished deprecation is the most expensive outcome available to a platform team.
# Platform Adoption Without a Mandate
You built a good paved road and half the teams still went around it. Adoption is not a persuasion problem or a compliance problem - it is a product problem, and a team routing around your platform is telling you something a mandate would have hidden. The four reasons teams say no, the switching-cost arithmetic nobody does, and how to win the moment of creation instead of the argument.
# The Platform Team's First 90 Days
A new platform team's first ninety days decide whether it gets a second year, and almost every team spends them building something to prove it exists. What the first quarter should actually produce: a written mandate including the no, baseline numbers you can only measure now, the inherited ticket queue read as a requirements document, and one small painful thing fixed by week six.
# Your Cloud Bill Is Not a Finance Problem
Cloud cost is a feedback problem, not an accounting one. The invoice arrives monthly, aggregated, weeks late, addressed to someone who cannot change a line of it - while the people who chose the instance size never see a number at all. How to make cost a platform capability: attribution as a paved-road default, unit cost instead of total spend, cheap defaults, and showback before chargeback.
# Your Security Policy Needs a Paved Road
Secrets management and policy-as-code fail in a specific way: the platform team ships the rule without shipping the road that satisfies it. A rule without a road is a tax on developers, and taxes get evaded. How to turn security controls into paved capabilities - workload identity instead of distributed secrets, observe-warn-enforce rollouts, and exceptions that expire.
# Build vs Buy Is the Wrong Question
The platform build-vs-buy spreadsheet almost always lies, because it compares the sticker price of a license against the sticker price of construction and forgets that a thing you build is a thing you operate forever. The real decision isn't build or buy - it's where you draw the line. Buy the undifferentiated substrate, build only the thin layer of opinion that is actually yours, and fund the result like a product, not a project.
# The Error Budget Nobody Spends
An SLO is only a reliability practice if the error budget under it is a decision you actually make. Most teams set a target from ambition, measure the wrong thing, and never change a single plan when the budget runs out. How to pick a target with slack, measure it on the user's journey, and write the policy that makes a blown budget mean something.
# The Real Project Was Never the App
NutriFinder is the friendly face, but the real project sits one layer down: OSDb, the Open Supplements Database - an open, normalised reference for sports-nutrition and supplement data, refreshed by an LLM-powered Playwright pipeline and heading toward a public API anyone can build on.
# Golden Paths, Part 2: The Second and Third Path
The first golden path is an adoption project. The second and third are a portfolio problem, and the dangers invert: sprawl, forked templates, and a platform team that says yes to everything. How to pick the next road, reuse the first one's guts, and keep the paved-road count honest.