Introducing Specfy
Hi everyone,
I'm Samuel, Software Engineer and the Founder of Specfy. Specfy is an open-source platform designed to enhance communication and decision-making within your engineering organization. By connecting to your GitHub, it extracts all metadata to consistently provide an up-to-date infrastructure graph and stack documentation.
Today, I'm eager to share why I built this, the challenges it addresses, and our future plans.
§Motivation
At my previous job, Algolia, I frequently struggled with a persistent and widespread issue: internal technical communication is hard. More often than not, team members were left scrambling, sifting through different sources in search of crucial information. Nobody had a clear understanding of the entire stack and how services were interacting interally and externally. Product management and leadership was often blindsided, uninformed of key technical choices. Newcomers? They faced an uphill battle, trying to make sense of our internal workings.
Born out of this very frustration, Specfy aims to be the single source of truth, aligning teams towards greater technological coherence.
§What problem is Specfy solving?
The core product released today is trying to solve 2 specific issues:
- Onboarding
Welcoming a new team member, or collaborating with a team you never worked with before, often present an immense challenge. Gaining access to the Source Code can sometimes span days, whether due to security protocols or drawn-out processes. While code is crucial, time is invaluable. Even with code access, the direction often remains elusive. In best-case scenarios, a team member might guide you, but this is often inconsistent across teams and critical information could be forgotten along the way.
All in all, the process of onboarding is often clunky, depends on the good will of a few persons and the information quality is not consistent across a company.
- Discoverability & Consistency
Effective scaled communication is complicated. Many meticulously crafted documents either remain unread or undiscovered. And when you do find what you were looking for, there is a good chance the information is no longer exact.
For companies with multiple engineering teams, you probably have realised that you have absolutely no clue what people are working on. Even top-tier leadership, like VPs and CTOs, might be oblivious to a significant chunk of the products currently running.
Specfy does not aim to solve every organisational issue inside an R&D org. Instead, it aims to lay a foundational platform. A unified approach to describing your infrastructure, production environment, and tech decisions. All accessible company-wide, ensuring information remains automatically updated with minimal human intervention.
§Next steps
Today, I'm very glad to release the MVP of Specfy. This is the product I wish I had at my previous job. A platform that could've been a savior in terms of time and efficiency for many like me.
Yet, this is merely the starting line. Having a exhaustive map of every production of your company with every dependencies and technical details, unlocks an immense playground. Cost efficiency, tech redundancy identification, infrastructure optimization and recommendation, improved documentation, and so much more.
In the immediate next steps, you can check the Beta Roadmap. The next big feature is the Reporting page, to explore all your projects' tech in a single page to improve discoverability and finally give the leadership a big picture of what are the most proeminent tech used inside their company.
§Join Specfy
I'm really excited to go on this adventure, and I can't wait to see you be part of it.
Don't hesitate to share your feedback at contact@specfy.io or in our Discord. During the Beta you can also try our advanced plans for Free.