Meet Miro Engineering: Developer Tools with Josip Janzic
The Miro Developer Platform complements Miro — the visual collaboration workspace — by empowering developers and partners to build their own apps and integrations on Miro. In this blog series, we spotlight the people of Miro Engineering, so you can get to know the faces behind the platform. Our distributed team spans the globe across 12 regional hubs and 8 time zones, including offices in Amsterdam, Austin, Tokyo, and Berlin.
In this post, we’re featuring software engineer Josip Janzic, based in Amsterdam, who builds tools to empower developers using the Miro Developer Platform.
What drew you to engineering as a career?
When I got my first computer as a child, I was fascinated by the fact that moving the mouse would cause the cursor on the screen to move and was instantly in love with these machines.
In my teen years I was playing a lot of computer games. As I got bored with the games I had, I eventually discovered that you can change them. Change the way characters look, change their behavior or the rules of the game. This was my first introduction to programming and software engineering. I find it fulfilling the way that I can bring to life an application that is based on my own ideas and vision.
Tell me more about your role and your team at Miro.
I work as a software engineer in the Developer Experience team in Miro. Our goal is to make it easy for external developers to integrate with our platform and build Miro Apps that extend the functionality of our main product.
What’s the relationship between the Developer Experience team and the Miro Developer Platform?
As part of the Platform stream, the Developer Experience team makes sure that developers can easily learn about our Developer Platform features and are equipped with the right tools to do that. We create and maintain documentation on our developer portal, build clients that make it easy to connect with our API, create code examples with best practices, etc.
Our main stakeholders are external developers so we maintain a community forum and a Discord server where we stay in direct contact with our users. We answer their questions there and run user research to get community feedback about the platform.
We also work closely with the internal framework teams that build the APIs and Web SDK to make sure that while they build the new features they take the experience of our developers in mind.
What kinds of tools have you helped build to improve the developer experience?
We have created and currently maintain an API client for Typescript that makes it easy to integrate with our REST APIs.
We built create-miro-app, a command line tool that can be used to generate boilerplate code for new Miro apps. This makes it really easy to get started and build new Web SDK or REST API Apps. This tool also includes Mirotone which is our CSS design system that can be used to create Apps that match our design guidelines.
We have also published a developer space page on our portal — a one page where developers can find all the resources needed to get onboarded and learn about the platform, manage their Apps and see the badges that they can achieve by completing certain requirements.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
Recently I’ve worked on an interactive code editor that can be embedded on documentation pages. This editor allows our Web SDK users to try out different code samples and explore the various features that it offers without leaving the documentation pages. The editor offers auto-completion and can execute the code on any board that the user has access to.
We’ve also included this on our Scavenger Hunt challenge where developers have to find hidden clues on a Miro board using different SDK methods to get a badge.
We’ll continue to feature Miro Engineering employees on our blog, so you can get a glimpse into their roles and the impact they have on the Developer Platform. Be sure to follow us to get reminders in your inbox when we post about engineering culture, technology issues, and product developments.
