Hypergrowth headaches (Ep. 485)

When a company hits a period of hypergrowth, developers are in for a thrill ride. They need to start scaling their systems, moving to service architectures and clouds, and looking to solve problems others haven’t. But hypergrowth brings headaches, too, and chief among them is how to keep everyone aware of what’s going on with teams that they aren’t a part of. 

When Spotify ran into this hypergrowth problem, they created Backstage, an open-source framework for building developer portals. Ben and Ryan talked with Helen Gruel and Tim Hansen about the genesis of the project, keeping docs with service information, and how Backstage’s plugin ecosystem keeps engineers from getting lost among dozens of tools. 

Episode notes

Like a lot of good tools, Backstage started as a way to stop using a spreadsheet. They knew it was something worth open-sourcing when conference attendees paid more attention to the tool than the topics of the talks. 

Backstage treats docs-like-code, keeping markdown files in the same repo as the code. Down with wikis, up with pull requests!If you want to learn more about Backstage, check out our recent webinar with Emma Indal, a web engineer at Spotify.

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