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Backstage Weekly · Issue 111

Roadie Local Enters Beta, Canon Launches & Backstage v1.36 Released

Roadie Local moves into beta, Canon launches its new design system site, the State of Backstage survey gains momentum, and Backstage v1.36 brings major frontend updates.

SamSam Nixon·

News

👋 Welcome to Backstage Weekly 111! We're keeping it light this week, just a (big) product announcement, the new design system getting serious, a bump on the State of Backstage survey and a version release from the oss project. Not much :)

This week:

  • Roadie Local is moving to beta

  • Canon gets a website

  • State of Backstage keeps growing

  • Project news: v1.36-next

Roadie Local is moving to beta

Roadie Local

We mentioned it last time but for those that missed it: a self-hosted version of Roadie is coming and its coming fast.

We'll be talking about this a lot in the next few weeks and months, but the gist is that we'll be offering a locally runnable, self-hosted version of Roadie. It'll include all that you know and love about Roadie SaaS and be free for less than 15 users.

Read all about it on our blog.

If you're interested, there's still time to sign up as a Design Partner for the initial rollout but we'll be closing sign-ups for this at the end of the month.

Sign up for Roadie Local

Canon gets a website (canon.backstage.io)

It's all Canon this, Canon that these days, but with good reason.

The default Backstage UI has been largely unchanged for 4-5 years and UIs for dev tools have come a long way since then.

That's why we're so excited about Canon and the shift to BaseUI  and headless components (for those not au fait with all this frontend jazz - it's about decoupling component structure and behaviour from styling, harkening back to the days of the HTML, JS and CSS internet). It means you have much more control over styling than you do currently.

Exciting stuff.

Check it out at https://canon.backstage.io/ State of Backstage Blog

🚨 State of Backstage Survey 🚨

The State of Backstage  survey is going strong.

Our goal is a few hundred responses by the end of March and we're very much on track. That doesn't mean we can let up though: the more responses we get, the more representative of the whole community this survey will be.

We'll announce the results in a report in Spring 2025.

Visit stateofbackstage.io  to complete the survey.

Project updates

There have been a few updates since our last newsletter.

  • Backstage v1.36.0  is up and brings Canon to it's first full release. There's also a lot of prep for a move to React 19 and the new frontend system. Reading the tea-leaves, you may assume they're related and that a bunch of frontend changes are the ways, but I couldn't possibly speculate...

Thanks!

Sam Nixon