Iteratively building a treehouse platform took some courage, upskilling, specialist tools, and some margin for the unknown and unforeseen. Having spent over 20 years accelerating application developers by building (software-based) platform capabilities, and more recently via internal developer platforms, I’ve recently been reflecting on some of the subconscious decisions I made whilst building phase 1 of a treehouse project. Here I’ll present my experiences and tips for building platforms in the software world, as well as some highlights of what happened when I turned my hand to the physical realm, amongst some trees in Lincolnshire, UK.