Backstage Weekly 43 - 4 Huge Milestones Achieved

Wow! What a week for Backstage. In the span of a few days we saw all of the following milestones achieved:

1. Backstage turned 2 years old 🎂
2. Backstage version 1.0 was released
3. Backstage was accepted into the Incubation with the CNCF
4. Backstage reached 100 public adopters

The combination of Incubation and v1.0 release paves the way for more adoption, a bigger community, more contributions — and continued growth in the ecosystem. Everything should start to snowball even more quickly from this point forward.

To learn more about the milestones achieved by the entire Backstage community, check out the following links:

1. Backstage blog post on turning 2 years old (including a shoutout for Roadie!).
2. Backstage blog post on the 1.0 release.
3. CNCF announcement on joining the Incubator.
4. Backstage on the new Spotify NerdOut podcast.

Merged recently

181 pull requests were merged in the past 2 weeks. Here are the highlights

Google calendar widget for homepage

Alex Rybchenko from Box contributed this super useful Google Calendar widget which lets you see your upcoming meetings on the Backstage homepage. #9719

Imagine this widget beside another one which shows your open pull requests and you can start to get a sense of how the homepage can become the first place you visit when you arrive in work each morning.

Previewing UI for scaffolder templates

It’s quite easy to make a mistake in your YAML when writing a scaffolder template, and only realise once you have re-imported it into Backstage and attempted to run it. This slow feedback loop hurts development velocity.

Phil Kuang from FactSet has partially solved this problem by adding a preview UI for software templates. It allows you to see the effect of template changes in the browser in real-time. Check it out in action in Phil’s demo below. It’s awesome! #9841

Roadie news

After months of hard work and beta testing, we announced the general availability of the Scaffolder on Roadie’s SaaS Backstage platform. See it in action in this 3 minute video where we demo a scaffolder template which creates a GitHub pages website.