The Myth of the Green Field: Every Platform Has Roots
Part of a "Software Engineering Enchiridion": Platform Engineering
(Image: A pristine park to play in, and mostly a fiction in platform engineering)
“No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig.”
— Epictetus, Discourses
If software is shipping, there’s already a platform. It might be a glorious palace of Kubernetes clusters, or it might be Jenkins held together with duct tape and prayer. But it exists.
The myth of the green field is a narcotic for engineers—promising purity, perfection, and a chance to escape the sins of the past. But software has history, like scars on skin. Even if you torch the servers and spin up shiny new tools, you’re still dragging business rules, cultural habits, and tribal knowledge behind you.
The wise platform engineer doesn’t pretend to start fresh. They harvest what works, compost what doesn’t, and build new shoots from the soil that’s already there.
Aphorism
Green fields are myths; platforms always grow from existing soil.
Practices
Map the platform you already have. Tools, scripts, hacks, habits—catalog it all.
Notice “shadow platforms”: the home-grown bash scripts and Slack rituals people rely on to ship. They are part of reality.
Don’t dream of a revolution. Plan for evolution. Plot one valuable baby-step step, then another.
Communicate the journey like a product roadmap. Not a single road. Not a manifesto.
Experiment and Explore, being prepared to be wrong.
Honour what works. Replace only what bleeds more than it pays back.
Pitfalls
Declaring a green field and pretending the old world doesn’t exist. That’s not vision—it’s arrogance.
Designing the “perfect” platform while real people are still deploying with smoke signals.
Trashing the old system without understanding why it survived.
Ripping up everything at once, and watching engineers sneak back to their duct tape fixes.
Checklist
Did I actually map what’s already shipping code?
Have I asked platform users where the real pain lies?
Am I evolving instead of promising to reinvent?
Can I show value today, not in six months?
Did I resist the cheap thrill of mocking the old stack before I understood it?
Examples
Bad: A team declares, “We’re starting green field!” They spend six months building a shiny CI/CD pipeline. Meanwhile, everyone keeps shipping through the old Jenkins monster. Nobody migrates, nobody cares.
Good: Another team accepts Jenkins is the current heartbeat. They clean up the pipeline templates, add logging, and chip away at flaky steps. They carve out migration paths where it matters. Within weeks, not years, developers feel the difference.
The myth of the green field is comforting, like imagining you could move to Paris and reinvent yourself with a beret, a new name and a reinvention of the lost generation.
The truth is harsher, and better: you are stuck with the ground you stand on. But that ground is fertile. Tend it with care, and you’ll have roots strong enough to grow new forests.
Further Reading
Kent Beck — The Product Development Triathlon (Desert & Rainforest metaphor)
Skelton & Pais — Team Topologies (platform as product, evolutionary growth)
Epictetus — Discourses II.17 (on working with what is given)
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