I love my layer cakes, and recently spoke about layered design systems that allow for developers to jump in at the layer that makes sense for them, and allows for maximum emergence of value.
When building a layered platform, I often think of the world of Lego and how utterly fun and creative that universe is. I aspire to enabling developers in the same way.
I mentally split things up into the concepts of: blocks, sets, and kits.
Blocks
Lego blocks are the base level primitives that exist for the platform. They offer clear capabilities, and have interfaces that are as universal as possible.
On the interface side you have the way the the tubes on the bottom interlock with the studs on top of other bricks. This standard allows the composability of the majority of the blocks. It’s all about the interlock and the spacing.
For capabilities, you get the specialization on top of these interfaces. Think of the engines that can be connected to the car systems to make them drivable. That engine can also be composed in a multitude of ways to deliver force for many ideas.
In our world of software, we have the same thing, with interface glue such as props with React, JSON for formats, HTTP for networks, and so on. Then when you look at a platform such as Cloudflare, you see that these are composed with infrastructure blocks such as D1 for databases that speak the language of Workers, R2 for distributed object storage, etc.
Blocks compose with other blocks. Almost anything can be created from this, the lowest of layers. And when you create a new primitive that fits the interfaces, creatively can explode with the possibility.
Sets
Starting from first principles, from the lowest level of blocks, can be overly complex. In practice, someone can build the next level of abstraction that solves a problem and can share it with others.
These are patterns, or recipes, or… Sets. With Lego, you most often see people buying sets with instructions on how to build a collection. I remember getting instructions with many ideas that I could reuse blocks to create with.
In software we often see this grouping of capabilities in various frameworks, that come with their own instructions on how to put things together. At other times you see templates, where you have a starting point of blocks to give you a strong leg up. Vercel does a great job of providing these, making it easy to start building on their platform.
Kits
There is a slightly different form of abstraction on top of blocks, and that is kits. These are meant to be for a particular purpose and are more restrictive that sets. The blocks and setup fit together much better (are less blocky!) and you wouldn’t take the parts of a kit and use them to make something different.
In software, an extreme case would be a proprietary language with components that only let’s you build extensions that look and feel like the platform they run on. A kit would make sense if you wanted to be very restrictive on extensibility, and you value making it as easy as possible to do certain things, and hard to break out.
You only really want to codify kits when you are very sure that they are very common and useful. If you have a scenario where many people will want to clone and tweak, you may be on to something with a kit.
There are many valid cases for kits, but it is also true that too often companies make the choice to over-invent. It is so very tempting to create a domain specific language, or even a custom programming language. But first, consider codifying constraints using languages and platforms that many developers have spent the time to learn already, where there is community, and answers, and where AI tools have something to have been trained on 😉
You can poke and make fun of English, in the same way that you can do so with JavaScript, but there is a reason it is still thriving whereas Esperanto isn’t.
Can you see the blocks, sets, and kits in your platforms? Are they well layered?
NOTE; My good friend and “one of the best platform engineers I know”, Dimitri Glazkov, has written about these layers from a slight different lens in his great piece: 4 layers.