The Tech Radar – A neat way to visualize your organization’s engineering technology stack
A little background:
I am a software engineering manager that leads the development team for an international retail company. Our IT department spans a few technology groups that work with various parts of the business. As these teams began to grow I needed a way to document the technology choices we have made.
Why we needed this:
It was becoming hard for me to remember everything in my head. A growing organization meant that there were more people working with more technologies. I needed to understand their purpose and determine if it fit well within the big picture.
The tech radar gave a high level overview of the technologies used and a single place to reference. Each value leads to a more detailed page that talks about the specifics behind each. I documented where we used this technology in the company and why we chose it over other similar options.
This also provided a great resource for recruiting new employees. We were able to give a quick overview of the types of technologies we are working with and testing.
It also was a useful resource to the leadership team. They could see the various technologies we work with and form a better understanding of how each one applied to the business.
How we did it:
The visualization we used is an open source package made by Zalando. They maintain a GitHub repository for it at: https://github.com/zalando/tech-radar. The idea behind the tech radar was made popular by ThoughtWorks, a technology consultancy company.
Hello, my name is Aaron Newcomer. I am a writer, web developer, photographer and researcher. I have multiple blogs and websites that feature my content so I created this site to curate it all into one place. Click some of the articles and you will get a good understanding of who I am and what I do!
