Simon Willison’s Weblog

Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency (via) This is smart: the "golden path" approach to encouraging a standard stack within a large engineering organization. If you build using the components on the golden path you get guaranteed ongoing support and as much free monitoring/tooling as can possibly be provided. I also really like the suggestion that this should be managed by a "council" of senior engineers with one member of the council rotated out every quarter to keep things from getting stale and cabal-like.

Charity Majors describes the process like this:

1. Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers.
2. Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).
3. Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components ... but if they don't, they're on their own. They will have to support it themselves. [...]