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From Philosophy to Full-Stack: Building a Backstage Plug-in in Just 6 Weeks 🚀
Can a junior developer with zero experience in React, TypeScript, or Backstage ship a production-ready plug-in in just six weeks? Mathilde Ançay, a media engineering student from Switzerland, recently proved that the answer is a resounding yes.
Speaking about her journey during an internship at Aalia System, Mathilde shared how she transitioned from studying French art and philosophy to building sophisticated internal developer tools. Her story is a masterclass in rapid onboarding and human-centered engineering.
💡 A Radical Shift: Backstage is a Framework, Not a Tool
When Mathilde began her internship, her supervisor, Olivier, gave her a piece of advice that changed everything: Forget about the features.
While most people see Backstage as a collection of tools like the Software Catalog, TechDocs, or the Scaffolder, Mathilde’s onboarding focused on a different reality. Backstage is a full-stack development framework.
The catalog, search functionality, and database access are not just product features; they are services provided by the framework itself. By shifting her perspective, Mathilde stopped trying to “use” Backstage and started “building” on top of it.
📊 The Project: The Satisfaction Tracker
Mathilde’s mission was to create a Satisfaction Tracker plug-in. While most engineering metrics focus on performance, deployments, and technical debt, this tool introduces a human perspective into technical data.
Key Features:
- Simple Interactions: Employees quickly indicate their work satisfaction over time.
- Aggregated Dashboards: Visualizes satisfaction trends at both the individual and team levels.
- Data Integration: Reuses the Dhex hub data model (presented at KubeCon 2024) to track metrics across the organization.
The goal was to make feedback easy and engaging, providing a vital signal for organizational health that technical metrics often miss.
🗓️ The 6-Week Roadmap
Mathilde divided her internship into three distinct phases: Learning, Experimenting, and Developing.
Week 1: Navigating Abstraction 🔍
Mathilde spent the first week reading documentation, exploring demos, and setting up a local Backstage instance. She noted that the biggest bottleneck wasn’t the TypeScript syntax, but the sheer level of architectural abstraction.
Week 2: The “Small Win” 🛠️
To bridge the gap between theory and practice, she built a simple Event Management plug-in. This small, full-stack project clarified how the frontend and backend communicate and how routing works within the ecosystem.
Weeks 3–6: Full-Scale Development 🏗️
Mathilde moved on to the Satisfaction Tracker. She integrated the company’s business logic and the Dhex hub framework. During this phase, the challenge shifted from technical syntax to design ethics: How do you track satisfaction without making employees feel monitored?
⚖️ Challenges and Trade-offs
Building in such a short window required navigating several hurdles:
- The Learning Curve: Simultaneously learning React, TypeScript, and Backstage created significant cognitive load.
- Abstraction Layers: Understanding which logic belongs to React versus the Backstage framework is a common point of confusion for juniors.
- Trust vs. Tracking: A major design challenge involved deciding what data should be visible and to whom, ensuring the tool remained a feedback mechanism rather than a surveillance device.
What Accelerated the Process?
- Weekly Goals: Breaking the project into manageable milestones.
- Small Experiments: Building throwaway plug-ins to test concepts.
- Human-Centered Design: Mathilde’s background in philosophy helped her focus on user engagement and trust.
🎙️ Q&A: Community vs. Custom
During the session, an audience member asked a poignant question regarding existing tools.
Audience Member: Did you consider using the existing feedback community plug-in available on GitHub, or did you omit it to learn how to write plug-ins yourself?
Mathilde Ançay: I didn’t consider the community plug-in for this project. My goal was primarily experimentation and learning. I had a specific vision for the subject and wanted to build it myself to truly understand the process.
🌟 Final Thoughts for Teams
Mathilde’s journey offers a powerful lesson for companies onboarding junior talent. If you are bringing juniors into the Backstage ecosystem, expect architectural confusion before technical difficulties.
Even in a short 6-week window, a junior developer can contribute meaningful, high-quality work if they view Backstage as a development platform rather than just a tool. As Mathilde’s commit history shows, the path from “abstract confusion” to a “shipped plug-in” is paved with small experiments and a willingness to embrace the framework’s complexity. 👨💻✨