Arnel Jan Sarmiento
Arnel is a Cloud Engineer and Python Developer with over four years of experience designing and building cloud-native, serverless systems at scale. As an AWS Certified professional, he specializes in creating secure APIs, scalable data pipelines, and AI-driven backend services that power real-time applications across fintech, health tech, and infrastructure-focused projects. He collaborates with globally distributed teams on high-impact work while also leading DurianPy, Davao’s official Python User Group. Through this community, he champions developer mentorship, technical learning, and open collaboration to advance the region’s growing Python ecosystem.
Session
Backstage has quickly become a de facto framework for building internal developer portals (IDPs) for teams implementing platform engineering. Powered by a centralized software catalog and opinionated "Golden Path" software templates, it lets platform teams standardize how services are created, documented, and deployed.
The catch is that these templates are effectively part of your platform. If a Backstage template silently breaks, for example, by missing annotations, using outdated CI configuration, or including invalid infrastructure snippets, every new Python service created from it starts life already broken.
In this talk, we treat Golden Paths like production code and show how to test them using Python. We will walk through building a small Python test harness that generates projects from Backstage templates, validates their catalog metadata and annotations, verifies that the generated Python service installs, lints, and passes tests, and optionally inspects dry-run plans to ensure required infrastructure actions are present. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns and code they can drop into CI so that every change to their Golden Paths is automatically tested with Python before any developer ever clicks "Create Service."