DEV Community: What the Portal

Finding Product-Market Fit

WTP | WhatThePortal.com — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 18:45:25 +0000

What the Portal's free tier is now booooooosted!

We covered the details more specifically in our post here:

TLDR; we're trying to find Product/Market fit - aka solving the right problems for the right people in the right way.

To do that, we frankly need more developers to use the platform and to tell us how it's going. Good, bad, ugly - any and all feedback is what we're after.

Are we missing critical integrations? Is it too confusing moving widgets around? We need to know - and in return, we've removed all paid tiers until we find the mythical PMF.

So hop on over, create a Portal, and let us know how you like it (or not)!

Create a Portal

Profit Engineering: the Ultimate Guide to Pull Requests

WTP | WhatThePortal.com — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 18:57:47 +0000

If I write this correctly it'll be the last guide you'll ever need to read about pull requests. Aimed at software engineers of all levels my hope is you'll better understand why Pull Requests (PRs) matter and how to write/review them... and then share this post with your friends/team to achieve the same.

This is one piece in a soon-to-be complete series named "Profit Engineering". What's that, you ask?

Profit Engineering is what I call the art of writing code to generate profit for a company.

Put another way: writing code that makes more money than it cost to create & maintain - not code that's perfect, "cool", or impressive to interviewers.

This requires a different way of thinking and can be uncomfortable at first, but time and time again this mindset has proven invaluable to many a business and can undoubtedly increase your perceived value as a contributor...

New update: Onboarding Improvements

WTP | WhatThePortal.com — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 15:29:43 +0000

We just released a new update adding some clarity to the onboarding experience, more sensible button sizes, and other UI improvements - checkout the full details here:

https://whattheportal.com/blog/onboarding-improvements-7-12-2024

Have feedback? Tell us in discord!

What charts would you want in a Portal?

WTP | WhatThePortal.com — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 01:12:41 +0000

shadcn came out with some nice looking charts recently - we're going to add some into the widgets for you to see on your Portals. Boom.

Which ones would you want, and for what type of widgets?

Join the discussion

https://www.reddit.com/r/WhatThePortal/comments/1dzj122/how_about_some_charts/

Introducing: What the Portal!

WTP | WhatThePortal.com — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 18:45:40 +0000

Today we're launching What the Portal!

...what on earth is that, you ask? What the Portal is an engineering visibility platform enabling developers to see everything happening in one place.

Open Pull Requests, new tasks & issues, error logs, deployments, workflow runs, and so much more. Instead of having 20 tabs open and hoping not to miss something (you're probably missing something), What the Portal gives individual dashboard-esq views into everything happening at once.

1 tab, much sanity.

Why visibility?

Over the years we've realized something - and it's going to sound silly.

Knowing what's going on with your code, app(s), & team(s) makes you an incredibly faster & more valuable engineer.

That used to not be so difficult "back in the day" when developing websites & software without version control and directly uploading files to LAMP servers.

In spite of numerous simplifications in the software industry, there's
more things to pay attention to now than ever before.

This really starts to add up and wear on a person's sanity, drastically lowering how productive you can be.

What is What the Portal?

WTP is a Saas platform that integrates directly with the places you work - GitHub, Linear, Sentry, etc. - and intelligently presents the meaningful, actionable, relevant pieces to you at all times.

This is done through what we call Portals (think of dashboards) and widgets.

Freely arrange your Portal to see the happenings you care about, in the way you care to see them, with near real-time data updates.

How is it useful?

The summarized pitch: What the Portal makes it easy to stay informed of team-wide development activity and action items.

Let's break that down into a digestible list:

Integrations: industry-leading tools & services like Git providers, Issue trackers, Log aggregators, & more.
Branches: see new work started by peers, know when main gets updated, etc.
Deployments: finally know when your code lands where it was supposed to (or didn't).
Events: all the "happenings" across all your apps & teams - errors, triggers, goals, etc.
Issues: see when things go wrong and the work to do - and who's doing what.
Pull Requests: the easiest way to see when code needs reviewing, or been stuck waiting for too long.
Workflows: our personal favorite - see all the individual workflow runs, and checks/jobs within them for ultimate visibility.
Sprints & Cycles: see how your team is progressing through their workloads and lend a hand where needed.
and so, so much more...

Even just listing a summary of widgets & integrations seems overwhelming!

Head on over to make your first Portal, and start seeing how much easier dev life can get.

Stay tuned for more updates!

excerpt from the official What the Portal blog announcement post.