About
What this site is for, and how to publish your team's work on it.
Platform teams here run a lot of work in parallel — tools being introduced, services being migrated, systems being switched off. Most of it eventually lands on somebody else. Signpost is where each team writes down what it is doing, which stage that work has reached, and what is about to change for the teams that depend on it.
It exists to make one particular thing impossible: finding out about a breaking change after it has broken you. Everything on the site — the roadmap, upcoming changes, the strip on the front page — is built around dates that other teams need to plan around.
There is no database and no admin panel. The site is generated from files in a git repository, so the history of what was announced, and when, is the git log.
How it works
Edit one file
Every streamline is a single YAML file. Adding one, or posting an update to one, means changing that file and nothing else.
Open a pull request
Your team owns its own directory, so your own team reviews and merges it. There is no central queue to wait in.
It is live
Continuous integration checks the content and tells you exactly what to fix if something is wrong. Once it merges, the site rebuilds itself.
Publishing your team's work
Anyone can contribute — this is not limited to the teams already here. If your team builds something other teams depend on, it belongs on this site.
Post an update
Something changing? Add four lines to your streamline file — the date, how much it affects people, a title and the detail. Two minutes.
Add a streamline
New product, migration or deprecation? Copy the template in the contributing guide into a new file under your team's directory. Five minutes.
Read the contributing guide for both, including the copy-paste templates, what the validator will and will not let through, and how to run the site locally if you want to preview a change.
Following along without visiting
Every update is published to an Atom feed, and each team has its own feed linked from its page. Point a feed reader — or a chat channel that can subscribe to one — at it, and announcements come to you.
The reading guide covers that in full, along with how to read the roadmap and what each impact level means for you.
Running it yourself
Signpost is open source under the MIT licence. Everything specific to one organization lives in a config file and a content folder, so another company can fork it, replace both and deploy. The adopting guide covers configuration, ownership, and deployment — including what to do if your instance has Pages turned off.
Where to go next
- The repository
- github.com/Anonycoders/signpost-sample
- A question this site cannot answer
- #platform-questions