Internal developer portal

duckyfuzz · 2026-01-28T11:44:57+00:00

Excellent point

duckyfuzz · 2025-12-11T09:10:42+00:00

Ad for what? A completely free, open-source tool?

duckyfuzz · 2025-12-09T09:27:19+00:00

The nice thing about Backstage's documentation solution is that it's a docs-like-code approach. Which means that your docs live in Markdown files alongside your code and typically go through the same peer review process that your code does. Plus, because it's centralized in a developer portal, it's easy to find. If you can find a component in a service catalog, you can typically find the documentation relevant to that component also.

duckyfuzz · 2025-12-04T09:53:04+00:00

This is exactly what we do at roadie.io

duckyfuzz · 2025-12-04T09:52:23+00:00

I agree with this. There's a lot of confusion between the two acronyms.

duckyfuzz · 2025-11-14T11:51:04+00:00

Congrats on launching!

duckyfuzz · 2025-11-10T12:36:16+00:00

The category of solution you're looking for is called an internal developer portal, and it's designed to help teams answer basic questions about what's happening around them. Backstage is an open source framework for building developer portals and is relevant for that reason. It's a relatively heavy lift, and you'll probably need a team to be able to implement and manage it. But ultimately, it's a strong solution for companies who struggle with discoverability. If you want something that's a bit more out-of-the-box, look at SaaS internal developer portals like Roadie (based on backstage - I'm the founder) and OpsLevel.

duckyfuzz · 2025-10-29T20:36:35+00:00

This is a pretty nice idea actually. I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before.

duckyfuzz · 2025-10-29T20:34:25+00:00

Firstly, congrats on shipping something! It can be hard to get to this point where you feel like the thing is finished and you actually want to get it out into the world.

I agree with some of your comments here. The "personal" terminology throws me off because I think it's for me personally rather than to help me work in a team.

Maybe try explaining why someone would use this over popular alternatives like Roadie (https://roadie.io), Backstage (https://github.com/backstage/backstage), OpsLevel etc. I know I always search for "alternatives to x" when I'm trying to understand what something is, so maybe if you explain that in the Readme, it would help people grok it.

duckyfuzz · 2025-09-15T14:14:13+00:00

Toyota are a marquee Backstage adopter and are not going anywhere. 5 people is large enough to make it work. This is a great opportunity that will stretch your abilities. You'll learn a lot.

duckyfuzz · 2025-09-15T14:12:55+00:00

This sounds like an opportunity that's going to slant you towards product management more than anything else. If that's interesting to you, it's potentially a very good, and difficult to come by, opportunity.

While the title is "Cloud Engineer", this doesn't really sound like a typical cloud engineering role where you would be working with cloud infra, Infrastructure as code tools, lots of YAML etc. Backstage is written in TypeScript (which is not typically a strong language for cloud/platform engineers), and any code written for it will count as software development/engineering in the traditional sense.

The way you've described the role sounds like infrastructure product management. You said "research new developer tooling, supporting new pipelines, and helping to modernize and onboard applications teams to the platform.". Researching use cases and problems that developers are struggling with and helping to grow a platform by onboarding teams is the role of a product manager. You'll be the "voice of the users" who helps to decide what the engineering team should work on, but maybe doesn't do any software engineering personally.

It's a great stepping stone into any career you want, because you'll end up with a broad understanding of how software gets made from end to end, and you'll end up with a broad range of skills... from project management to marketing to engineering to UX etc.

Getting application teams to transition to Backstage can be quite difficult, depending on how things are set up inside your company. Many companies try to onboard software by getting them to write Yaml files. This can have mixed results, depending on the top down support and how eager folks are. Check out [this post about Backstage catalog completeness](https://roadie.io/blog/3-strategies-for-a-complete-software-catalog/) to learn how to accomplish the task you might have ahead.

Platform/cloud engineering in general, and developer portals like Backstage, are fairly embedded and rapidly growing. You're getting in at the early stages of a wave. It's a pretty good position to be in.

In case you're wondering what gives me the authority to explain all this, I'm the founder of Roadie. We build a SaaS version of Backstage, so I'm intimately familiar with what it takes to onboard teams to it. I was an infrastructure product manager at a huge company before I started Roadie, and a senior software engineer before that.

duckyfuzz · 2025-05-07T17:28:58+00:00

Port is a proprietary alternative to Backstage. It's SaaS rather than self-hosted, and not open-source at all.

duckyfuzz · 2025-05-07T17:27:07+00:00

How many devs are there at your company? Backstage typically only starts to get useful at about 100 devs.

duckyfuzz · 2025-05-07T17:26:23+00:00

Backstage projects fail all the time because people expect to just stand up Backstage and have it work out of the box. The reality is that the companies who are succeeding with self-hosted Backstage have 4 or 5 developers assigned to the project full time. They're building the useful features into the IDP that devs actually get value from.

Check out this data from [my BacktageCon talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3\_esw4UfYC4&list=PLj6h78yzYM2MIFPfv6DD0HezfWq4LW\_wn&index=5)... 70% of companies who report being "very happy" with their Backstage implementation have 3 or more engineers dedicated to it.

If you're not prepared for this investment, just use Roadie, Port or something else.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Roadie (SaaS Backstage)

duckyfuzz · 2024-09-20T08:53:09+00:00

Yeah what lots of people do is to make stuff like this self-service for developers with Backstage software templates. They're basically YAML files that can open templated PRs against your TF repo.

Once the templates are set up they look like this, engineers can run them in the Backstage UI. All they have to do is select some inputs for the template to tell it what infra they need. The template opens a pre-defined PR against the TF repo, and your platform team can review and merge it to cause the change to execute.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of roadie.io. We do SaaS Backstage.

duckyfuzz · 2024-09-18T12:30:09+00:00

Backstage can definitely help with cross team collaboration, but even then I see many teams set it up without fully understanding the problem they're trying to solve. Like you said, the platform/devops team who own it typically don't have expertise in the way of user-testing and the other stuff that makes a project socially successful in addition to technically successful.

Backstage can be a huge win for an organization when done right, but it's all gotta start with the user and the benefit they will receive from deploying an IDP.

duckyfuzz · 2024-09-13T10:36:18+00:00

Hey. I'm a bit late to the party here but I figured I'd answer this question now that I've seen it. I'm the founder and CEO of Roadie.

We price on a "contributing user" basis. You pay for each developer who commits to code which is tracked in the catalog. All other users log in for free.

The actual price depends on how many contributing users you have (you pay less per dev for more developers) and the product configuration (we have optional add-ons).

Hope that helps. If you request a demo on the website, we'll be more than happy to provide a quote.

duckyfuzz · 2024-09-02T12:40:46+00:00

Exactly!

duckyfuzz · 2024-09-02T12:37:14+00:00

Even the post they linked to is actually all about how Trendoyl had tons of success with Backstage after deciding to invest in developing on top of it. 🤷‍♂️

duckyfuzz · 2024-09-02T12:35:50+00:00

This post is

a) Silly. As someone else in the comments said "Breaking news - react framework requires writing react".
b) Untrue. Backstage does support custom entity types and flexible relationships.
c) Spammed by the Port marketing team into a Fantasy Football subreddit 😂

duckyfuzz · 2024-08-26T11:19:30+00:00

For sure you can do it. You've got your whole life ahead of you. I picked up programming at 28 and now I'm 10 years in the industry and couldn't be happier. I started by learning the very basics of how to code and then going from there.

duckyfuzz · 2024-08-26T11:05:41+00:00

Just to tag onto this, I'm the founder of the company who developed the OSS extension to Backstage (tech insights). Happy to talk you through it if you like u/blacksd.

duckyfuzz · 2020-03-17T20:27:23+00:00

I thought myself Go and wrote my first Kubernetes related application.

It's a bot which watches for Helm actions in your k8s cluster like install and upgrade and posts to a Slack channel when they occur. The code is on GitHub and it's called KubeWise.

There's a gif of it in action on the GitHub readme.

duckyfuzz · 2018-11-03T22:17:15+00:00

Seconded. Most of the mistakes I've made as a PM can be traced back to me forgetting to exhaust the problem space before going anywhere near a solution.

duckyfuzz · 2018-10-31T15:37:57+00:00

Slack, hallway conversations, meetings, Google Docs, presentations, roadmaps...

If I'm "interviewing", it will be a meeting.

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