Blog | DevPortals.Tech

Building a GitHub Contribution Graph with Next.js Server Components

Jan 1, 2026 - 3 min read

Joaquin Romo

When building a portfolio, showing your GitHub activity tells a story about your consistency, the technologies you work with, and how you balance personal and professional projects. In this guide, I walk you through building a production-ready GitHub contribution graph using Next.js 14 Server Components and TypeScript.

Why Server Components?

Unlike client-side rendering, Server Components allow us to fetch data directly on the server, keeping our GitHub API token secure and improving initial page load performance. This is especially important for portfolio sites where first impressions matter.

Why Redirect Management is Critical for Developer Portals

Dec 18, 2025 - 7 min read

Joaquin Romo

Redirects are one of those infrastructure pieces you don’t think about until you need them. I’ve worked with them in two different contexts: a large-scale developer portal using Netlify with complex wildcard patterns and catch-all rules, and now this personal portfolio site on Vercel where I just implemented my first redirect after renaming a directory.

What struck me is how different platforms handle the same fundamental problem—keeping URLs stable when content moves—but with vastly different syntax and approaches. Whether you’re managing hundreds of versioned documentation pages or just reorganizing a small site, the principles remain the same.

From Chaos to Clarity: A Technical Writer's Journey Through Git Cherry-Picking and Team Collaboration

Dec 15, 2025 - 9 min read

Joaquin Romo

Introduction

As a Senior Technical Writer, my role extends beyond crafting clear documentation—it involves navigating complex technical challenges to help my team achieve our objectives. Recently, I led an effort to salvage months of work from a stale feature branch, teaching me valuable lessons about git workflows, team collaboration, AI-assisted development, and the resilience required in technical documentation work.

From Forks to Branches: Streamlining Team Git Workflows

Dec 1, 2025 - 4 min read

Joaquin Romo

As part of a GitHub working group within a 50-person technical writing team, I recently helped lead our transition from a fork-based workflow to a centralized branching strategy. This shift simplified our collaboration model and reduced friction across four sub-teams. Here’s what we learned.

The Challenge

Our team of technical writers was using personal forks of our main documentation repository. While this approach worked, we identified several pain points:

Extra complexity for common operations
Confusion about which remote to push/pull from
Inconsistent workflows across team members
Limited value for our use case compared to open-source projects

The GitHub working group formed with representatives from each sub-team to evaluate whether forks still made sense for our internal collaboration model.

How I'm Using MDX Frontmatter to Scale devportals.tech

Sep 24, 2025 - 4 min read

Joaquin Romo

Building devportals.tech has been an exercise in practicing what I preach about documentation engineering. One of the most impactful decisions I made early was leveraging MDX frontmatter not just for basic metadata, but as the foundation for scalable content workflows. Here’s how it’s working in practice.

Starting Simple, Scaling Smart

When I first set up this Astro Starlight site, I could have just used basic Markdown. But knowing I wanted to build something that demonstrates professional documentation practices, I started with structured frontmatter from day one:

---
title: "Content Branching Strategy for Documentation Teams"
description: "How to manage documentation releases, staging, and quality control using Git workflows"
date: 2025-09-23
authors:
  - name: Joaquin Romo
tags:
  - git-workflow
  - content-management
  - documentation-strategy
  - staging
---

Simple, but it’s already paying dividends.