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Autodesk is building an internal developer portal using the open source technology Backstage. Backstage is an open source framework for building developer portals, created at Spotify, donated to the CNCF, and adopted by thousands of companies. It’s an exciting initiative to transform our developer experience with a single self-service hub for all tools that developers need to build and manage software.
The team leading the initiative – Developer Enablement – is inspired by the possibilities offered by Backstage and considers it crucial to be an engaged participant in its open source community. We’ll hear from the team about three recent open source contributions – what motivated them and their impact.
Meet members of the Developer Enablement Team
Larry is Senior Principal Engineer working on Beacon – The Autodesk Internal Developer Portal, built on Backstage. He has worked over the years on desktop applications, backend services, web apps and full stack. He enjoys the challenge of solving complex problems and the satisfaction of seeing Autodesk software empower creativity and innovation.
Reyna is Software Development Engineer working on Beacon and Workflow Service. She has been an Autodesker since April 2022. Her role has allowed her to explore different products with experience on various tech stacks. At Autodesk, she enjoys learning from others and looking for opportunities to help fellow engineers.
Lily is Senior Engineering Manager overseeing services and tools focused on increasing developer productivity, making it easier to code, and enabling a consistent development experience to ultimately deliver better products to our customers.
Why does your team focus on contributing to open source?
Larry
Over the past few years, most of the projects I've worked on relied heavily on open-source packages from Maven and NPM. Leveraging these building blocks has enabled us to focus on our core competencies and deliver products and functionality more efficiently. By contributing to open source, we can improve the tools we use daily, drive the collaborative spirit, and foster a culture of shared responsibility.
Reyna
There are many good reasons to contribute to open source. Since our team leverages an open source platform, it is beneficial for us to contribute fixes and feature improvements that would improve our product on our timeline. Not only that, but it can also teach us more about the product we are using with feedback from the maintainers.
Lily
By contributing to the open source communities, you get more than what you give since you learn from others, their experiences, and different ways of working. You open the door to have the whole community brainstorm solutions to a problem instead of a single team working alone on it.
Describe the contribution you made to Backstage
Larry
I am passionate about UX fit and finish. If there are inconsistencies in the presentation, or unnecessary toil introduced by poor design or implementation, I cannot help but notice and want it fixed. As developers, we strive to write beautiful and elegant code. When we miss the last 5%, I think it reflects poorly on us for our users and erodes confidence customers have for our products.
When I joined the internal developer portal team, I noticed some cumbersome behavior in one of our main tabs - first impressions are important, and I was disappointed. But, when I looked at the same tab in the live upstream demo project (Backstage Catalog | Backstage Demo), I saw the same issue. We've been talking about contributing to the community, and here I saw a chance to start with a small, but impactful, contribution.
So rather than simply fixing our code, I reported a bug against Backstage, and provided a simple fix in a pull request. The fix was eventually accepted and merged, and we automatically benefited from it, as did everyone else in the community, when we synchronized to the latest upstream code.
I subsequently encountered a broken link in the online documentation for the Software Catalog API’s, a link to a page I really needed to find (The Life of an Entity). After eventually finding it, I noticed an ‘Edit this page’ link on the page with the broken link. Sure enough, that took me directly to the source markdown file in GitHub where I could fix the link and make a pull request (Update api.md). A day later, the fix was accepted and merged and now the link works for everyone.
Reyna
There are a variety of out-of-the-box home page cards available through Backstage, which can be used to customize a home page. The available home page components could be more extensive, and the Backstage maintainers noted that contributions here were especially welcome. Our team decided to build a "Featured Docs" card and share it with Backstage to help extend the options. In doing so, we got several tips from the Backstage maintainers on improving our use of different features in Backstage. These conversations in the open also help other teams improve if they read through the PR commentary, which can be common practice if someone wants to implement a similar component. Here is the PR that I submitted
Lily
In my role as manager, I advocate for the project’s value and ensure that our implementation is in sync with Backstage’s best practices, so we can maximize the benefits from the community’s contributions and give back. As managers, we can create a welcoming environment for contributors internally and externally and encourage collaboration to learn together. We also ensure that we comply with legal requirements and licenses and ensure intellectual property rights are respected.
What tips do you have for others to contribute to open source?
Larry
If you come across something in an open-source project that you believe should be changed, it is likely that others feel the same way. Instead of simply accepting the status quo and making do with what you have, it is worth taking the time to express why you think a change is necessary and engage with the owners of the code. Ignoring the issue and resorting to workarounds may just end up causing more work in the future.
Reyna
If there is an open source library or platform that you leverage frequently or are passionate about, consider contributing a minor fix to start. That will get the ball rolling and give you the confidence to contribute on a larger scale.
Lily
There are several ways to contribute to open source. It need not be just with code. There are opportunities to report bugs, improve the XD of the project/product, participate in forums to share best practices, or translate documentation to grow the communities in different regions. As managers, we can empower our teams to give to time be engaged members of open source communities.
In October 2023, Autodesk hosted a Developer Productivity Summit, inviting companies building internal developer portals with Backstage to learn from each other. Read a summary of the summit and get presentation recordings in this post.
Contributing Authors:
- Lily Becera, Sr manager, software developmenet
- Larry Knott, Sr principal engineer
- Reyna Nikolayev, Software development engineer
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