


“Just being nominated for the DevRel shortlist is an honor, and platformOS was nominated in two categories. Then to also WIN - WOW!“ - Adam Broadway, CEO of platformOS
We are so excited to announce that platformOS has won the Best Ongoing Developer Experience category at the DevRel Awards 2022.
The DevRel Awards 2022, presented by Orbit, is organized by Hoopy to celebrate the best of DevRel in 2020 and 2021. Selected from nominations made by the public, a jury of DevRel experts have chosen winners in nine categories.
platformOS was nominated in two categories, Best Developer Onboarding and Best Ongoing Developer Experience, and from nearly 1,000 nominations, we got shortlisted in both categories.
The top 3 shortlisted nominees in each category were:
Best Developer Onboarding
Best Ongoing Developer Experience
We were happy to receive the award for Best Ongoing Developer Experience.
The winners of the DevRel Awards 2022 were selected by an international jury of developer relations professionals:
Thank you to the organizers and the judges for providing their expertise and for the amazing effort in evaluating all the nominees in the various categories.
While working on our developer experience, we continuously paid attention to
We discuss these aspects in more detail below.
Our main target audience is Frontend Developers and Site Builders. Our audience combines technical people with various levels of programming skills like Experienced Developers, CTOs, Junior Developers and Site Builders, and non-technical people who come to our docs to evaluate if platformOS would be a good fit for their projects like Project Owners, Business Analysts, and Project Managers.
We are a B2B company, so most of our Partners are companies that build their solutions on platformOS. However, we also always make sure to have direct contact with a couple of our clients (e.g. Intel who we built DevMesh for) to be able to learn from their experiences with our platform and improve it in sync with the needs of the end-client.
We facilitate and encourage collaboration with our amazing community in many ways that we present in detail below.
The platformOS Developer Portal provides comprehensive onboarding journeys to the three main segments of our target audience:
We provide two options for developers to start building their platformOS sites; start from a pre-made template or from scratch based on our detailed tutorials.
Try out the different routes of our onboarding here:
We wanted to make it very easy to get involved for all segments of our target audience, so we offer a number of ways to contribute, taking into consideration the time contributors have available, and their skill level. For some quick editing, like fixing typos or adding links, contributors can edit the content easily on the GitHub UI. For heavy editing, adding new content, or developers who prefer to use git, we provide a complete Docs as Code workflow. We thank all of our contributors by giving recognition to them on our Contributors page as well as on our GitHub repository’s README page.
When we started thinking about our editorial workflow we decided to come up with a process that could work for all participants, including developers in our team and our broader community, but also writers, editors, or external contributors.
Our main target audience is developers, and they are the ones who contribute most frequently to our documentation. As they already use some kind of version control system, most often git, we selected a tool that they are already familiar with, GitHub. And to make the whole workflow easy to adopt for them, we follow a Docs as Code approach. Our editorial workflow for content is very similar to how code gets reviewed and deployed. All of our code and content is on GitHub; and for transparency (and to have the same process for all participants), we process all project management tasks on GitHub’s issue tracker.
This means that community members can open tickets, discuss issues, see what we are planning and what we are currently working on, including pull requests that are in review. This has proven to be very helpful for our community members because the whole life cycle of any task is fully transparent and they can follow the whole process. Everything is collected on GitHub - for example, if we get feedback on the feedback block of our documentation site, we create a ticket on GitHub for that task.
The steps of our editorial workflow:
Our documentation works with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). On every code merge to our master branch our CI/CD of choice, Github Actions, runs quality checks to ensure that the website will remain operational after the changes are deployed.
These are the steps in our test process, in order:
If everything goes according to our standards, it would deploy to production.
We deeply care for accessibility. Right from the design phase, we use Figma’s Able accessibility plugin. We regularly test for accessibility with various tools and ensure that the site complies with all accessibility requirements as proven by its perfect scores in Google Lighthouse, Wave, and AChecker. Besides the technical requirements for accessibility, we think inclusive and accessible language is just as important. This is why we have added accessibility guidelines to our Style Guide and regularly review our content for inclusiveness. Learn more about our approach to accessibility in this article.
We communicate with our community through the following channels:
Besides getting constant feedback from the community through the channels described above, we plan regular checkpoints in our process to facilitate testing and course-correction. During development activity we tie these checkpoints to development phases. At the end of each larger release we conduct user interviews and compile and share a short survey for community members to fill out. This helps us clarify the roadmap for the next development phase.
Learn more about our user research methods and previous and ongoing user research rounds.
We had the opportunity to share our experience and have inspiring conversations with fellow documentarians and members of the DevRel community at various conferences:
We are honored and grateful that our efforts have been recognized by this award. We would like to thank all members of our team and community who contributed to our developer experience by providing feedback, requests, edits, new content, or participating in user experience research.
Ensure your project’s success with the power of platformOS.