Internal platforms promise speed, consistency, and scale — but what happens when they become a distraction? In this episode, Chase Roberts, COO at Northflank, joins Sylvain Kalache to examine the quiet ways platforms erode developer experience when not planned carefully. 

From abandoned golden paths to shadow deployments and brittle YAML pipelines, Chase walks us through: 

• Why early PaaS got developer experience right and what it missed 
• The cultural bias toward building over buying (and its hidden costs) 
• How complexity quietly kills productivity and reliability, even when everything “works” 
• The three questions every team should ask before building an IDP 
• What a future of truly portable, resilient platforms might look like 

Episode links: 

• Build vs. buy: The platform engineer’s conundrum