The Story of My First Product: PingCAP Docsite Preview
I've published open-source projects and written plenty of scripts over the years, but PingCAP Docsite Preview is the first thing I think of as my own product: the one I built for every docs contributor, not just myself. It shows what documentation changes will look like on the live site while you're still writing or reviewing them.
That turned out to matter more than I expected. Reviewers can read an actual rendered page instead of a diff in a pull request. It even doubles as a staging site, where customers can read the docs for private-preview features. Broken builds and rendering issues also show up before deployment, which CI doesn't catch.
It has been four years since I first wished something like this existed, and nearly three since I shipped v1.0.
Looking back, this product exists because I happened to be standing in the gap between two teams: the frontend engineers building our documentation platform, and the technical writers using it every day. This post is the story of how a tool grew out of that gap, and how building it helped me grow as well.