Introducing the Upsun Developer Center

This month our Developer Relations and Advocacy teams are excited to share with you our latest resource: the Upsun Developer Center.

What’s it for?

In short, the Developer Center is meant to act as the central resource, a primary hub, for all technical content you as an Upsun, Platform.sh, and Blackfire user will need to be successful using our tools. Whether that’s training, reference documentation, technical articles, example code, demos, talks, or community news. Everything happening in the world of Upsun resources will be found right here at devcenter.upsun.com, or will be accessible from here.

Why do we need one?

I’ve worked at Platform.sh for over 6 years, always in some capacity within Developer resources, training, and public documentation. In that time we’ve produced a lot of helpful things for (and with) the community:

• the public documentation, and the API documentation
• many, many templates, example repositories, and public libraries
• awesome repositories of helpful snippets
• a community forum
• talks, demos, podcasts and livestreams on our YouTube channels
• our Upsun, Platform.sh, and Blackfire blogs

Now while these resources are available to you, and while my colleagues and long-time users may understand where these pieces are and how they fit together to answer questions like:

• Can I deploy Meilisearch on Upsun?
• How do I set up load testing?
• Why is the file system read-only at runtime?

you do kind of have to know where all these resources are - on top of the “rules” of Upsun in the first place - to put the pieces together to answer questions like these ones.

As you can imagine, the problem isn’t made simpler with the three brands of Upsun, Platform.sh and Blackfire.

Obviously, this is not what we want for users in their first days working with our platform (or on any day for that matter). While our resources are excellent they can be difficult to find unless you know exactly where to look. They should be more discoverable, more intuitive to navigate, and it should be much clearer how different kinds of documentation fit together via common product concepts.

What’s in the MVP?

Today in the Upsun Developer Center you can find:

• A new landing page with quick access to the most useful documentation and resources
• New search combining Dev Center, documentation, and blogs in one place
• A new technical blog containing tutorials, how-to guides, and in-depth discussions about how Upsun works under the hood
• A videos pane to bring visibility to all our talks, demos, livestreams and podcasts
• Community resources with details around our Discord, how to view and provide feedback on the product roadmap, as well as our community programs.

What’s next?

This MVP is just that – an MVP. It’s only the beginning, but we have big plans for this site. Some of the things we see ahead include:

• Continue to improve the search experience, especially as it brings together resources across all of our sites, and code examples on GitHub.
• Integrate and bring visibility to public code examples, but also forum discussions, FAQs, and popular topics on our new Discord server.
• Improve the way we interact with our users within the Dev Center - not just in retrieving product and documentation feedback, but also in providing ways that you can contribute yourself to the resources seen here.
• Modernize docs.upsun.com by folding it into the Dev Center.
• Introduce new community programs and sponsorships, details of and submissions to which will also be found here in the Dev Center.
• Expand training, certifications, CLI/API reference docs, and much, much more.

This launch is an exciting first step in our team’s efforts to better enable our community with the resources you need to succeed on our platforms. Be sure to join us on Discord to stay tuned for updates and to share with us what you’d like to see on this site.

Be seeing you!