![]() ![]() Modern service-oriented architectures like the one I documented tend to fragment engineering departments, especially when each team is given the freedom to perform their own work the way they see fit. But finding information about each API (beyond playing with cURL requests) was difficult. I was given the list of APIs we exposed and even had some early documentation done for me. My first project when hired into my last role was to document the API we gave to integration partners. I also reached out to a former colleague, Omar Delarosa, now a senior backend engineer at Spotify who works on their ML plugin, to see how his developer experience changed from one role to the next. In this article, I’ll talk about the problems I faced, how I solved them, and how Backstage solves them better and for free. It was Backstage, the surface where we would do the demo from, and everybody was like, what is it?” My thoughts exactly. ![]() “It wasn't the tool itself that got the attention. Spotify open-sourced their homegrown developer portal, Backstage, because when they used it at conferences, developers couldn’t pay attention to anything else: “A few folks went to one of the cloud conferences, and they were demoing some tool from within Backstage,” said Helen Gruel. And I helped set up an internal documentation site, while trying to enforce templates and get all of the development teams to add their information to the site.īackstage, a framework for building developer portals, would have handled all of these functions-and more-far better than my ad-hoc solutions. I tried to create a central hub for all of our internal tools, onboarding docs, and information. This grew into the document of record for services. To track down the people I needed to talk to about specific APIs, I created a spreadsheet that listed all services, their owners, code repos, docs, and more. It was a larger engineering org that encouraged autonomy, and as a writer with a technical aptitude, there were a lot of things that I could apply myself to. In my last role as a technical writer, I took on a lot of developer experience responsibilities, since knowing and documenting the client-facing APIs meant I had become pretty knowledgeable about how the overall system (and engineering org) worked. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |