Consistent frontend/backend engineering help for the docs site

I'm opening this to start the discussion of having a dedicated frontend and backend engineer for the docs site.

The issue is that we often reach out to some engineers that are more than willing to help us, but they have deliverables they cannot afford to miss. In that regard, we rely on their good will and maybe personal time to help us.

We do not (yet?) need full-time engineers, but are requesting go-to FE engineers and BE engineers with whom we can discuss issues, collaborate, and assign select issues/merge requests. As part of this, we would like to arrive at a well-defined process for getting the work assigned and scheduled.

Here are the areas that typically need work for the documentation site. We occasionally need help within these categories after making the most of our own technical capabilities.

Common Back-End Work for Documentation

  • Markdown engine enhancements
  • Open API spec genernation for better API docs and more
  • Ruby helpers, filters, rules, scripts, GitLab CI/CD, Docker
  • Build process, troubleshooting, debugging
  • Gem updates and dependencies
  • Linters
  • Versioning
  • GitLab itself (e.g. help links in GitLab); evaluate proposals. engage other eng teams

Common Front-End Work for Documentation

  • CSS styles and mixins, layouts (erb, haml), templates
  • Site HTML structure (SEO, Semantics, HTML5, etc)
  • JavaScript functions
  • Occasionally JSON and XML
  • Upgrading libraries (e.g, Bootstrap)
  • Search engine enhancements (Algolia, faceted search)
  • GitLab itself (e.g. help links in GitLab); evaluate proposals. engage other eng teams
  • Collaborating with UX
  • First up: new left-nav + relative positioning and mobile adaptiveness of all navs

cc @gl-docsteam

Edited by Mike Lewis