Don’t Curse The Weather, Explore & Prepare For It
Capturing the external forces as you curate your internal developer platform
(Image: Mt. Everest from the highest pass on the way to Base Camp North)
When first learning to ride a motorcycle I spent 5 days getting drenched every single day. This taught me one lesson: There’s no such thing as the wrong weather, just the wrong motorcycle boots.
Shortly after, when riding from Kathmandu through the Himalaya and across the Tibetan Plateau to Chomolungma Base Camp North in -15 degree temperatures and at an altitude of ~17k feet, the lesson was the same: Prepare for the weather. Drink three litres of water a day. Wear layers. And never run down a hill (because you’ll never run back up again).
This is a lesson for Platform engineering too. You can build the neatest developer portal, the slickest golden path, the most elegant API gateway—and yet, if you build against the climate, it will rot. This is what Simon Wardley calls “climatic patterns.” They are the rules of evolution in business and technology, the external forces that will influence the platform you can curate. You don’t control them and you ignore them at your peril.
Think of the climate like the sea. You cannot command the tide. You can, however, choose when to sail, where to fish, and when to get off the water before the storm hits.
A platform engineer who ignores the tide ends up shouting at the waves, clinging to a half-sunk raft of custom scripts.
A platform engineer who reads the tide harnesses it, catching the wind as CI/CD turns from custom craft to commodity service, as observability moves from artisanal dashboards to packaged, centralised single panes of glass, as AI dev assistants sprout on top of and within standardised platforms.
Wardley’s climatic patterns give us a survival kit:
Everything evolves. Today’s hand-tooled script is tomorrow’s SaaS checkbox.
Efficiency enables innovation. Commoditisation frees you to build higher-order platforms.
No one size fits all. Some parts of your platform are utilities, others are experiments. Treat them accordingly.
Inertia kills. The sunk-cost love affair with yesterday’s tools is the death of adoption.
Expectations always rise. Developers compare you to GitHub, not to your internal IT policy.
In 1865, William Stanley Jevons noticed something strange about coal in England. The more efficient engines became at burning coal, the more coal was consumed overall. Efficiency didn’t lower demand; it raised it, because it unlocked new uses, new industries, new possibilities.
Platforms off a similar dynamic. When you make deployment faster, developers don’t deploy less—they deploy more. When you make experimentation safer, teams don’t experiment less—they experiment more. When you lower the cost of creating, creativity grows. You don’t squeeze innovation through efficiency, innovation can breathe because of standardisation and efficiency.
This is not a bug. This is the point. Platforms that succeed are not measured by “cost reduction” alone. They are measured by the explosion of new demand, new services, new experiments that they make possible. Your golden paths should be designed with Jevons’ Paradox in mind: assume that if you make something easier, people will do more of it, not less.
That means two things for the platform engineer. Firstly, don’t be surprised by demand growth—celebrate it. It’s proof of value. Secondly, architect your platform ready for scale from day one. If a Day 1 type of task — happens infrequently and is error prone as it can be tricky — is made easy and self service, be ready for it to become much more frequently used,. If you pave the road, expect traffic jams, not empty lanes.
The lesson of climate plus Jevons is humility. You are not the master of the climate, and you are not the master of demand. You are its reader, interpreter, and navigator. Your platform survives not because it resists change, but because it embraces it—and thrives by anticipating that every efficiency you deliver can, and often will, drive even more demand.
Every road you pave fills with traffic
Climatic patterns show inevitabilities (evolution, commoditisation, rising expectations). Jevons’ Paradox explains why every efficiency spawns more consumption.
Some Practices
Map your platform components with Wardley Maps to see what is evolving.
Apply Jevons’ lens: if this feature becomes easier, what new demand will it unleash? Explore with Systems Thinking.
Treat increased consumption as a success signal, not a failure.
Design infrastructure with elasticity, injecting resilience to absorb demand spikes and other surprises without losing trust.
Budget not for today’s usage, but for tomorrow’s exponential growth.
Some things to avoid
Assuming efficiency will reduce workload (“fewer builds,” “fewer environments”). The cult of efficiency will m ore likely lead to greater demand and not less.
Over-optimising for cost-cutting rather than value creation.
Misreading rising demand as a problem instead of validation.
Failing to scale platform services to match the very success they create.
A Helpful Checklist
Have we forecasted demand growth if efficiency increases?
Do we treat platform adoption spikes as validation, not failure?
Are we architecting our platform for resiliency, elasticity and scale?
Are stakeholders aware that demand growth = platform success?
Do we celebrate Jevons’ Paradox as part of the platform’s value story?
Some Examples
The Good: Teams adopt a simplified, self-service and automated approval centric CI/CD pipeline. Deployment frequency doubles—platform team responds by scaling runners and celebrating developer velocity.
The Bad: Platform reduces environment creation time, demand spikes, and leadership calls it a cost problem instead of recognising success.
The Ugly: A team builds a platform for cost reduction, gets swamped with demand, collapses under load, and blames developers for “using it too much.”
A platform is both shaped by climate and subject to Jevons’ Paradox: every efficiency you deliver can increase usage. Design with evolution and amplification in mind.
Wardley climatic patterns show that platforms evolve with the tide; Jevons’ Paradox reminds us that efficiency multiplies demand, not reduces it.
Build for growth in demand, not stasis—your platform is a catalyst, not a cost-cutter.
Further Reading
Simon Wardley, Wardley Maps: Climatic Patterns
William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (1865)
Barry O’Reilly, Residues
David Woods, Four Concepts of Resilience