About the Tech Radar
The Doccla Tech Radar is the one place you go to understand where we stand on any technology decision. It captures what has been adopted, what is being evaluated, and what has been retired or is no longer recommended for new work. It makes our technical vision legible to newcomers and auditable over time.
It is:
- Immediately legible — a radar visualisation you can read in 30 seconds
- Authoritative — maintained by the Engineering Leadership team; decisions made outside the process are not on it
- Detailed on demand — each entry links to the discovery work and reasoning behind it
- A living record — changes are tracked and reviewed over time, so you can see how our thinking has evolved
How to read it
Entries are grouped into four quadrants: Languages & Frameworks, Platforms, Tools, and Techniques. Each entry sits in one of four rings that describes our current stance on it.
- Adopt — our default choice. Use this unless you have a strong reason not to.
- Trial — worth pursuing on real projects where the risk is manageable. We have evidence it works but have not yet made it a standard.
- Assess — worth exploring and prototyping. Invest time to understand it before committing to it.
- Hold — do not start new work with this. Existing systems using this technology are supported and should continue to be maintained; this is not necessarily a signal to migrate away.
How entries are structured
Each entry follows the same shape, so you get what something is, why it sits where it does, and what that means for you:
- What - what the technology is, written so it makes sense even if you've never used it, plus where we use it at Doccla.
- Why this ring - why it sits on the ring it's on. The reasoning behind the decision lives here, on the entry itself, rather than somewhere you have to go looking for it.
- What does this mean (optional) - what the ring means in practice: what to do, what's safe to assume, and any clarification worth spelling out. Simpler entries won't need it.
Entries are kept to what the decision needs. How decisions themselves get made and changed is covered under How decisions are made below.
How decisions are made
The radar is maintained by the Engineering Leadership team and informed by the four Engineering Co-ops: Platform, Backend, Frontend, and Mobile. Technology decisions are made through the Engineering Co-ops process — see the Engineering Co-ops page on Confluence for full details.