workflow

Self-Documenting Your Dev Workflow: How Writing Guides Made Me 3x Faster

Feb 22, 2026 - 6 min read

Joaquin Romo

There’s a moment in every developer’s journey when you finally realize: “I should have documented this the first time.”

Mine came after spending two hours debugging why my Sanity Studio components weren’t showing up in production—even though they worked perfectly on localhost. The problem? I had forgotten that my blog actually consists of two separate applications that need independent deployments.

This is the story of how writing documentation for “future me” accidentally made my development process 3x faster.

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.

Content Branching Strategy for Documentation Sites

Sep 17, 2025 - 3 min read

Joaquin Romo

When building a professional documentation site like DevPortals.tech, maintaining content quality while enabling rapid development requires a strategic approach to version control. Here’s the branching strategy I’ve implemented for managing documentation content lifecycle.

The Challenge

Building a portfolio-quality documentation site presents unique challenges:

Quality vs. Speed: You want to publish frequently but maintain professional standards
Work-in-Progress Content: Some sections need extensive research and iteration
Professional Presentation: Your live site represents your expertise to potential employers
Development Flexibility: You need space to experiment without affecting production