Backstage Community Session — Apr 16, 2025

Get a rundown on the improvements in Backstage v1.38, including using ‘yarn start’ for all your local development needs and more. Plus, watch a live demo of the New Frontend System, and Scandinavian Airlines drops in to share how they use the Tech Radar plugin. 00:06 👋 Vincenzo welcomes the community and goes over the agenda. 01:48 🚀 What’s new in Backstage v1.38: Core maintainer Fredrik Adelöw (Freben) discusses highlights from the latest release, including removal of React imports, GitHub integration changes, ‘backstage-cli repo start’, the new Gateway Plugin, Canon 0.3.0, and more. 09:37 🧑‍💻 New Frontend System demo: Core maintainer Patrik Oldsberg shows the latest features in the New Frontend System, including new card types, sticky cards, content cards, card summaries, tab groups and customization, element inspector, and more. 20:36 ✈️ SAS and the Tech Radar: Engineers from Scandinavian Airline’s developer experience team demoed how they use the Tech Radar plugin to help reduce fragmentation and align on core technologies. You’ll see how the team integrated Tech Radar with GitHub Discussions to reduce their dependence on long meetings and manual updates, while also fostering a more engaged and collaborative developer community around their paved roads. A tip of the cap to SAS for sharing! 35:15 🗯️ Q&A: How does Canon work with current custom themes, when do the maintainers recommend upgrading to the New Frontend System, and more. Join the Backstage community! Backstage is an open framework for building internal developer portals (IDPs). It was created by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2020. The Backstage Community Session is the monthly meetup where we all come together to listen to the latest maintainer updates, learn from each other about adopting, share exciting new demos or discuss any relevant topic like developer effectiveness, developer experience, developer portals, and more. 🗓 Join us for our monthly Community Sessions: https://github.com/backstage/community/tree/main/backstage-community-sessions ✉️ Subscribe to the newsletter for product updates, community news, and more: https://spoti.fi/backstagenewsletter 🧑🏼‍💻 For features, demos, and docs: https://backstage.io 🗣️ Have questions? Reach out on Discord: https://discord.gg/MUpMjP2