Today I’m releasing the first public version of the Silverfish IDP, an Internal Developer Portal designed to help developers and engineering teams understand the structure of their software estates — not just at the repository level, but at the component and dependency level too.
The Silverfish IDP takes a language‑first approach. It starts with repository discovery and grows into a broader platform for engineering insight and governance. The aim is to give teams clarity without without needing a complex platform rollout and without signing up to $1000s a year for the privilege.
The Silverfish IDP also takes an affordability‑first approach. It is completely free to use - and will remain so - for anyone just wanting to analyse public repos. I've built the product using a range of open source tools and libraries and this is just a way of me "paying forward" for the efforts of others.
What’s included in the first release
- GitHub‑based sign‑in and onboarding
- Workspaces and Organizations
- Repository mapping + scan‑state control
- Hierarchy naming schemes
- Component and dependency discovery for supported languages (the .NET languages, C#, F# & VB.Net, and Ruby)
- In‑product documentation
Why I built it
Teams often know what they’ve built, but not always how it fits together. And sometimes, they aren't really sure what they have even built. Things are created, the developer who created it moves on and well, let's be honest with each other, devs aren't always the best at documenting what they did. Silverfish aim to address both of these issues by making software structure visible and navigable and by providing information on the contents of each repo to help identify what is is and what it does.
What’s next
Short‑term improvements include more languages, better visualisations, hierarchy support, and workspace/org membership.
Medium‑term plans include quality rules, reporting, release tracking, and support for Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, and Codeberg.
Longer‑term: private repo support, GitLab, Stackhero, and richer metrics including selected DORA‑style measures.
It’s early days, but the foundation is solid — and I’d love feedback from the Dev.to community as it evolves.
