Do you find yourself asking the following questions? Where is the documentation? What fields are required to call your API? What solutions have others come up with for this problem? Is there a recipe I can follow when doing y or z? When working in organizations of all different sizes, I have similar questions.

Using a wiki would allow you to keep team documentation. By publishing swagger documents, I could show how to call my API. If I tag my repos appropriately, my code can be discovered and used as an example or inner source. While all of these are great on their own, they need to provide a central information hub for engineers. Backstage (https://backstage.io) is an open-source engineer portal with a vibrant plugin community geared toward solving these issues. It will become your engineer's primary stop for information and ideas.

I will demonstrate how to set up Backstage as a robust engineer portal in this session. Attendees will see how to deploy a backstage portal, catalog their software components, and create reusable templates. I will also summarize the vast array of available open-source plugins, while demonstrating how to install a few. Finally, I will show you how easy it is to create plugins.

By attending this session, you should walk away with the basics of how to set up an engineering portal and what that can look like with Backstage. The extensibility and the vast array of open-source plugins for customization will also inspire you.