2026-03-22 –, Yuchengco Hall 5th Flr. Y507 (Workshop Room 1)
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 If a Backstage template silently breaks, for example, by missing annotations, using outdated CI configuration, or including invalid infrastructure snippets, every new Python service created from it starts life already broken.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."
Backstage is widely used as the foundation for internal developer platforms. It centralizes service metadata, documentation, and self-service operations via a software catalog and plugin ecosystem. A key feature is its software templates, often called Golden Paths, which define opinionated workflows for spinning up new services, pipelines, and infrastructure with consistent best practices baked in. Production deployments at various organizations lean on these templates to deliver standardized, governed self-service for developers, and industry guidance increasingly recommends versioning and testing templates as seriously as application code.
Despite this, many teams still treat templates as “just YAML.” When a template breaks, for example, by missing required metadata, misconfiguring CI, or triggering invalid infrastructure actions, every new Python project created from it inherits the same problems. The result is that bugs propagate from a single template into every new repository generated from it.
This talk walks you through treating Golden Paths as first-class, testable artifacts and using Python as the test harness around Backstage. After a short primer on Backstage, IDPs, and Golden Paths, with real examples such as deploying Python applications to Kubernetes using template-driven workflows, we will live-code a small Python test suite. That suite will call Backstage’s scaffolder backend to generate a project from a specific template, inspect the resulting file layout and catalog-info.yaml (including owner, system, lifecycle, and documentation configuration), and run basic Python project checks such as installation, pytest, and linting. We will also demonstrate how to parse the scaffolder dry-run output to assert that required infrastructure actions, such as repository creation or deployment pipeline registration, are present.
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.