Why We’re Making Our Dev Docs Public

At Produce8, we believe transparency is important. So today we're announcing we'll be making all our internal technical docs public.

Teams that operate in a transparent way and “work out loud” have better communication, higher levels of trust and ultimately are more successful.

We want to extend that value of transparency to what we’re learning as we build our product. From now on, topics like:

• our coding standards;
• best practices;
• lessons learned; and
• style guides will be hosted on a public Notion page, which we’ll use internally and keep updated as we proceed.

As we’ve developed our system, at times we’ve found the documentation and examples available online to be lacking. We want to do our part to improve the ecosystem for those using the same tools. We’ve learned some things the hard way and hopefully we can save you some time by learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them yourself!

In the docs, you’ll find info on how we improved testability in our lambdas by implementing dependency injection with the Awilix framework, and how we use the Middy framework to build re-usable middleware that keeps our lambdas simple while enforcing complex business logic.

You’ll also find details on how we use CDK to manage a large multi-stack application, how our CICD process operates, as well as how we do contract and UI testing. And we’ve published two npm packages and counting to help with graphql schema management and dynamoDB data migrations, both of which are part of our build process.

For those interested, our stack is composed of the following:

• NodeJS as the common language with Typescript
• AWS lambdas
• CDK for infrastructure as code
• DynamoDB
• Appsync for Graphql
• API Gateway for REST

As we proceed, we’ll continue to add more to these pages, so please check back regularly.

Click here to browse our internal technical docs now.

If you have any questions or have any suggestions on how to make it better, we’ll be thrilled to hear from you!

• Connect with us on Twitter or LinkedIn .
• Check us out on NPM .
• Review our public-facing Github repos here .

Happy Trails :)

-Geoff