Being a Developer Advocate: Week 9

This week was only three days but nonetheless we got some things rolling which feels nice.

Giving Feedback

One of the things I really like about my position is that I touch so many different things because of my developer-focused viewpoint.

• Our user portal gets an onboarding guide which I helped to structure in a developer-friendly way and provided the texts.
• For a motion graphics video about our product I talked to our designer and validated some ideas she had. So far it looks amazing and I could help her understand the technical background better.
• I noticed some inconsistencies in a feature we released. We do not have an established process yet for getting improvements implemented. But I managed to get the need for it recognized!

Collecting Metrics for a Community & Advocacy Dashboard

High recommendation to watch this panel about Key Metrics for DevRel.

With that in mind, we started to collect Metrics for the first draft of a dashboard. Hopefully we get it ready for the monthly All Hands.

Docs improvement

Friday was filled docs (My favourite! 🥰). Removing clutter from the Getting Started felt nice. I also changed the link from our homepage to the docs, so users do not have to get click another time to get to the real stuff.

Then I thought: Let me implement a spellchecker real quick!
And when we are there already: Include it in the preCommit Hook.

What could possibly go wrong?

Getting it running was a piece of cake but it turned out it ran for ages. That was because it scanned all the pictures also.

Afterward, I included it in our preCommit Hook and the fun began: shell-Scripting 🤯

I did want to run the spellchecker only on changed files which are easy to find out with git diff --name-only --relative. --relative is needed because git always returns path starting from the root-Folder and the docs are in a separate folder. And then if you have new untracked files you will need git ls-files --others --exclude-standard.

Only to find out I have to transform the returned files to a String with this format "filepathone" "filepathtwo" ...
There my shell-Foo met its limit and I opted for a simple scan all files which is reasonable fast (about 2-3 seconds).

If you are interested. I used spellchecker-cli and I will write a post about my learnings 🧸