astro-starlight

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.

Starlight Sidebar Configuration Strategies: Manual vs Autogenerate

Sep 17, 2025 - 4 min read

Joaquin Romo

While building DevPortals.tech, I ran into a common documentation site challenge: how do you organize sidebar navigation when you want some content to appear in a specific order (like overview pages) while still automatically including new files as you create them?

This is the kind of practical problem that comes up constantly when building documentation sites, and the solution isn’t always obvious from the docs.

Building DevPortals.tech: From Idea to Live Site

Jul 20, 2025 - 1 min read

Joaquin Romo

As a senior technical writer who’s spent years managing enterprise documentation platforms, I’ve seen the pain points that drive teams to migrate from proprietary solutions to open-source alternatives.

This site chronicles that journey and provides practical guidance for teams making similar transitions.