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Presentation: Why Your Community Needs a Developer Portal

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How can a community like KDE benefit from a developer portal...and what is a developer portal, anyway? This talk aims to answer those questions, and offers practical advice for building a developer portal. The insights from this session can serve as guidance and inspiration to all contributors who want to make sure their community keeps growing and thriving.

As creators of Free and open source software, we put our users first. We do our best to deliver products they will enjoy using, and we support them in a number of ways - from packaging and troubleshooting to localization and documentation.

But what about the developers?

Developers are our users, too - they just use our software in a different way. While it's true they are usually self-reliant and perfectly capable of figuring out how stuff works, they do appreciate not having to waste time hunting down information. This is where developer portals step in as an invaluable tool for any community that cares about its developers - old or new; experienced or beginners; volunteers or paid.

Offering a developer portal as a centralized point for knowledge management and sharing sends a powerful message about a community, which is why more FOSS communities should embrace the idea of building one. Of course, despite the name, it's not only the developers who benefit from a developer portal. It can provide significant leverage in terms of onboarding, marketing, and collaboration with other communities or even businesses.

How does one build a developer portal, though? In this talk, we'll look at some best practices, useful tools, and common approaches. A developer portal is not just a collection of API docs - it has the potential to house many forms of content and provide support to different types of contributors. As with other similar solutions, it's all about tailoring it to your own needs. Over the last year, the KDE community has invested significantly into improving its developer documentation. This means the groundwork has already been laid, the wheels are in motion, and the right time to build a developer portal is - now!

Info

Day: 2019-09-07
Start time: 15:45
Duration: 00:15
Room: U4-01
Track: Community

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