Frontend Platform Goals and Roadmap

The Frontend Platform team, by the nature of their purpose, does not follow a traditional product roadmap and instead focuses on high-impact projects aligned with the company’s OKRs.

Mission

To empower all users and Sourcegraph frontend developers to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness by enabling and building a first-class web experience.

Vision

Using and developing Sourcegraph is effortless.

  • We have a frictionless developer experience that empowers our frontend engineers to achieve the maximum value from the time spent on development.
  • We have an intuitive, performant, and consistent user experience that makes Sourcegraph an indispensable part of every developer workflow.

Goals for

See also our completed goals.

1. Implement design refresh

The design refresh of Sourcegraph will impact the whole platform and focus on visual adjustments. It will mainly impact the following areas: navigation, file, diff, and code intel views.

Why do we need a design refresh?

  1. improve visual quality and user experience
  2. provide a more modern look and feel
  3. eliminate visual inconsistencies
  4. improve accessibility
  5. pay off some of the design and technical debt

2. Make it easier to onboard and contribute to our frontend codebase

We have heard feedback from many teammates (including new frontend engineers and experienced back-end engineers trying to make changes) that our frontend codebase is hard to ramp up on and contribute to.

2.1 Wildcard Component Library

We need to better our system to provide a base for growth, maintain consistency, and enable faster FE development. We want to do it by building a design system. In addition, by doing so, we’re looking to pay off some of our design and technical debt.

Why? Components system ➡️ consistent UX, faster delivery, better accessibility ➡️ better adoption, customer retention, more sales ➡️ Increased revenue

2.2 Frontend data fetching improvements

Consistency in the codebase makes it easier for new engineers to onboard and other developers to contribute. We are optimistic for performance improvements as well from improving this aspect.

3. UI performance improvement

Provide improvements to the actual page rendering performance and perceived performance when the user interacts with the application UI.