Software engineering

✨This talk was recorded at ElixirConf EU 2023. If you're curious about our upcoming event, check https://elixirconf.eu ✨ In this talk we will see how the Elixir patterns such as State Machine, Templating and custom behaviors are used as building blocks for a GitOps based Self-Service platform. The Self-Service automatically validates Git pull requests with a fast-feedback-loop and interactively engages relevant corporate stakeholders in the review and approval process. Additionally, external approval workflows are orchestrated when required. Once approved the self-service provisions all required resources in real-time using state of the art infrastructure design principles.

Never accept a diff if there’s no explanation for the question, “how will you know when this code breaks?  how will you know if the deploy is not behaving as planned?”  Instrument every commit so you can answer this question in production.

Karpenter

Clearly defined audience

One main purpose

But primarily, we write with new engineers in mind, which ensures the instructions are clear for everyone.

the best way to do something now (versus how they did it five years ago).

“The Golden Path is the opinionated and supported path to build your system and the Golden Path tutorial walks you through this path.”

Step-by-step-by-step

Also, step-by-step is a good way to get clear sight on how long your actual Golden Path is.

The tutorials just reflect the actual Golden Path. That’s what we need to shorten.

we need to make the actual Golden Path easier to follow and with fewer steps.

And the Golden Path tutorials are also about education. So, yes, we need to make it easier for engineers to build stuff — but it’s important to keep in mind that the tutorials are there to educate (in particular, new hires).

Going by the data, the Golden Path tutorials are Spotify’s most read and most used technical documentation.

and you only have a limited time for working on documentation — work on that.

they will use the set of tutorials as the basis for building an end-to-end product.

And, of course, it’s not just feedback on the tutorial — it’s feedback on the Golden Path itself

Improved ownership model

A Golden State is a list of checks that engineers can use to know if their systems are following the Golden Path.

End-to-end product Golden Path tutorial The way that the tutorials are set up currently is to serve individual contributors. But individual contributors are in teams and teams build products (features, run experiments, company bets) and are multi-disciplinary. It is a challenging task, but we are definitely excited by the idea of creating a series of Golden Path tutorials for teams that provide blueprints for building various types of products.