Company
Date Published
Jan. 8, 2025
Author
Kim Jeske, Kian Newman-Hazel, Kody Jackson
Word count
1641
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Cloudflare developer documentation team treats developer content like a product, iterating and refining it based on user feedback. They approach their documentation similarly to how an open source software project is created and maintained, making both the content and framework publicly accessible for contributions. This transparency fosters collaboration, learning, and innovation among developers. The team has recently migrated from Gatsby to Astro, a new custom documentation engine that brings significant improvements, including faster development flow, custom components, structured changelog management, improved performance, enhanced content organization, extensibility, development experience, JavaScript/TypeScript support, CSS management, and content collections. The migration was nearly twice as large as the previous one, but with careful planning and coordination, it resulted in removing a net 19,624 lines of code from maintenance burden and was a major success without downtime or rollbacks.